"IN DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE"
Volume 23 - March 2, 1999
Dear Readers:
Thank you again to the many readers who responded to my article on Carnival in Bolivia and the experience of getting all wet. This issue looks at a very different topic, but also about a group of people who are "all wet" in a different use of that term - the campaign in California to ban gay marriages, headed for the ballot exactly a year from this week.
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
"IN DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE"
I've been thinking recently about the vote that will take place exactly a year from this week in my home state, on an initiative called the "Defense of Marriage Act". The initiative is short and straightforward (pardon the pun), "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." The aim is to eliminate the slim possibility that California might have to recognize the marriages of gay couples, in the event that some other state makes such marriages legal.
HOW GAY MARRIAGE WILL ADD TO THE DIVORCE RATE
I am all for the defense of marriage. I've been married for almost nine years now and I think it's great. A lot of my friends and relatives (the straight ones of course) are also married and pretty much all of them would agree that marriage is an institution worth defending. But, I'll admit, the logic of why we need to prohibit gay marriages in order to protect straight ones escapes me a little.
But if you listen to the crowd of Christian extremists and righteous politicians sponsoring the measure, that is their argument. "The state must reserve marriage for a union between one man and one woman for the purpose of having children," warns the measure's sponsor, State Senator William J. "Pete" Knight. Perhaps as a compromise, Senator Knight's initiative would still allow marriages of straight couples who don't plan to have children.
Now personally, I don't see how my marriage with Lynn would be particularly threatened by the legalization of gay marriage. In fact we might get to go to a few more weddings, which tends to bring most couples a little closer. But I am willing to recognize diversity of experience, so let's think a minute about what effect legalizing gay marriages might have on some of the most common contributing factors to divorce.
How about domestic violence: "I don't know officer, I heard about that whole gay marriage thing and I just went nuts." Perhaps an increase in alcoholism: "When I heard about Bruce and Edward tying the knot, I just headed down to the bar and started to drink myself silly." Of course the obvious risk is that gay marriages will result in an increase in heterosexual infidelity: "Honey, I'm so sorry but all these new gay marriages got me so hot I just went out and slept with the first lesbian I could find." As the initiative's sponsors note on their Web site (http://doma.org/), "If homosexual "marriage" were legalized, it would open a Pandora's box of negative consequences."
Maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe the proponents don't really believe that legalized gay marriages would increase divorces among straight couples, maybe they just think it will "cheapen" the marriage experience for heterosexuals. One can certainly imagine a toast at a straight wedding after gay marriages are made legal, "Well Mary, Ted, it doesn't mean as much as it used to but here's to a happy life together." I mean, you really can see where these Defense of Marriage folks are coming from, can't you?
RACE IS OUT, HOMOSEXUALITY IS IN
I have been telling California political reporters for two years that the next right wing crusade in the state would be over gay marriage. Race is out, homosexuality is in. In every election year since 1992, some minority has been singled out for persecution by initiative, a tradition made popular by former Governor Pete Wilson. In 1992 he went after welfare recipients with a ballot initiative that failed. In 1994 he used a ballot attack against immigrants to win re-election. In 1996 he went after affirmative action, but it started to become apparent that the GOP's race-tainted initiatives were chasing tens of thousands of minority voters (especially Latinos) right into the Democrats arms. Not a smart move in a state where ethnic minorities are about to become a majority of the population. When millionaire Ron Unz walked onto the ethnic battlefield with his anti-bilingual education initiative last year, most GOP leaders tried to avoid the fight altogether. The ethnic backlash against the GOP helped lose them almost every major election in the state in 1998.
So, enter the gay marriage issue. It has all the same political requirements of Wilson's crusades - a target with weak public support and good red meat to throw to the conservative activists that drive the party. But this time, without that nasty political aftertaste of looking like a racist.
When I raised this issue with one of the state's senior political editors a while back, he responded, "I don't get it, why do gays want legalized marriage anyway." For one thing, for some odd reason, gay couples think they should be able to get the same economic benefits from marriage that straight couples get, like health insurance for example. My wife Lynn and I were married a month when she became eligible for coverage under my employer's health plan. A gay co-worker of mine had been in a committed relationship for more than a decade and still couldn't get her partner covered. But the issue is more than economic, it is also about having the same rights as other couples to legally recognize the depth of their bond.
When I think about this issue I can not help but think about Christopher McKenzie, my closest friend for more than twenty years, and his partner Samuel. As Chris slowly died from AIDS, Samuel went with him on his continual treks to the doctors, accompanied him through the ups and downs of T-cell counts and reconciling himself to dying so young, and battled on his behalf with an arrogant health system so that Chris could breathe his last breath at home among his friends, instead of in a sterile hospital room. Thousands of gay partners have gone through exactly the same, in many cases knowing as they looked down on their dying partner, that they were looking at their own futures just a few years away. These are the loving commitments that Senator Knight and his friends fear would cheapen the marriage experience for straight couples.
WE'RE SUPPOSED TO LISTEN TO THESE GUYS ABOUT MARRIAGE?
Compare these commitments to those of the politicians who sided with or even championed the ban on gay marriage when it came before Congress in 1996. There is the honorable Rep. Henry Hyde and his now famous "youthful indiscretion" at 40 which broke up one marriage. There is former Speaker Newt Gingrich who visited his ex-wife in the hospital, not to bring comfort, but divorce papers. President Clinton, in the news a bit recently for his own special definitions of marital commitment, made the marriage ban law with his signature. I raise these examples not to add to the current fad of persecuting public figures for their private peccadilloes, but to ask the question, "We're supposed to listen to these guys about how best to protect the institution of marriage?"
Maybe Senator Knight and his cohorts really do believe that
legal gay marriages would cheapen the marriages of straight
couples. If so, then let them focus on strengthening
their own marriages and let them pass on any invitations
they get to gay weddings (they don't even have to send a
gift). In fact, the leaders of the initiative merely follow
in the footsteps of those, who in another era, championed
laws against marriages between blacks and whites.
In the chorus of U.S. politics there is always that voice
that fears the people it does not know and which sings out
that fear in hopes that others will take up the tune.
Over the course of the next year California will hear that
voice of prejudice and fear singing loudly and voters will
make a choice. Do we identify more with the paranoia
of Senator Knight, or the genuine bond between Christopher
and Samuel and the thousands of other couples like them?
________________________________________________________________
THE DEMOCRACY CENTER ON-LINE is an electronic publication of The Democracy Center, distributed on an occasional basis to more than 1200 nonprofit organizations, policy makers, journalists and others.
Please consider forwarding it along to those who might be interested. People can request to be added to the distribution list by sending an e-mail note to "info@democracyctr.org".
Permission is granted to copy or excerpt any material in
the newsletter, with notice and credit to The Democracy
Center. Suggestions and comments are welcome.
Past issues are available on The Democracy Center Web site.
THE DEMOCRACY CENTER
SAN FRANCISCO: P.O. Box 22157 San Francisco, CA 94122 (415)564-4767 - phone and fax
BOLIVIA: Casilla 5283, Cochabamba, Bolivia
E-MAIL: info@democracyctr.org WEB SITE: http://www.democracyctr.org