A Dawg's eye view

Why This Is A Serious Civil Rights Issue"When gay people say that this is a civil rights issue, we are referring to matters of civil justice, which often can be quite serious - and can have life-damaging, even life-threatening consequences.

One of these is the fact that in most states, we cannot make medical decisions for our partners in an emergency. Instead, the hospitals are usually forced by state laws to go to the families who may have been estranged from us for decades, who are often hostile to us, and can and frequently do, totally ignore our wishes regarding the treatment of our partners. If a hostile family wishes to exclude us from the hospital room, they may legally do so in most states. It is even not uncommon for hostile families to make decisions based on their hostility -- with results consciously intended to be as inimical to the interests of the patient as possible! Is this fair?

Upon death, in many cases, even very carefully drawn wills and durable powers of attorney have proven to not be enough if a family wishes to challenge a will, overturn a custody decision, or exclude us from a funeral or deny us the right to visit a partner's hospital bed or grave. As survivors, estranged families can, in nearly all states, even sieze a real estate property that a gay couple may have been buying together for many years, quickly sell it at the largest possible loss, and stick the surviving partner with all the remaining mortgage obligations on a property that partner no longer owns, leaving him out on the street, penniless. There are hundreds of examples of this, even in many cases where the gay couple had been extremely careful to do everything right under current law, in a determined effort to protect their rights. Is this fair?

If our partners are arrested, we can be compelled to testify against them or provide evidence against them, which legally married couples are not forced to do. In court cases, a partner's testimony can be simply ruled irrelevant as heresay by a hostile judge, having no more weight in law than the testimony of a complete stranger. If a partner is jailed or imprisoned, visitation rights by the partner can, in most cases, can be denied on the whim of a hostile family and the cooperation of a homophobic judge, unrestrained by any law or precedent. Conjugal visits, a well-established right of heterosexual married couples in some settings, are simply not available to gay couples. Is this fair?

These are far from being just theoretical issues; they happen with surprising frequency. Almost any older gay couple can tell you numerous horror stories of friends and acquaintences who have been victimized in such ways. One couple I know uses the following line in the "sig" lines on their email: "...partners and lovers for 40 years, yet still strangers before the law." Why, as a supposedly advanced society, should we continue to tolerate this kind of injustice?

These are all civil rights issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with the ecclesiastical origins of marriage; they are matters that have become enshrined in state laws by legislation or court precedent over the years in many ways that exclude us from the rights that legally married couples enjoy and even consider their constitutional right. This is why we say it is very much a serious civil rights issue; it has nothing to do with who performs the ceremony, whether it is performed in a church or courthouse or the local country club, or whether an announcement about it is accepted for publication in the local newspaper.

 

Why Does Conservative Politics Find Gay Marriage So Deeply Threatening?As George Lakoff, in his excellent book, "Moral Politics" points out, conservatism is based on a "strict father" metaphor of morality, in which a wise father (church or political leader) sets the rules, and the children (the people) are disciplined to comply, thereby gaining self discipline, and with it, autonomy and self-sufficiency. For a complete understanding of this metaphor, which is beyond the scope of this essay, I would refer readers to Lakoff's book, but inclusive in that metaphor is a set of moral boundaries established by the "strict father," who is, in this case, the moral authorities of the church and the political system working in concert. These moral boundaries exist in society, in the conservative's view, not just to keep people on the straight and narrow path to autonomy and self sufficiency, but primarily to maintain social order and discipline, and that is their primary purpose. Compliance to the established moral boundaries implies acceptance of the legitimacy of the moral authority figures who established them, and it is this acceptance of the legitimacy of this moral authority that is viewed as the very basis of social order. Hence there is a deep investment in the legitimacy of the moral authority, often presumed to be none other than God himself.

Therefore, someone who moves off the sanctioned paths is doing something much more than just acting immorally; he is rejecting the goals of the society in which he lives; he is calling into question the purposes that govern most peoples' lives, but he is also doing something even much more threatening: By deviating from the standard, ordained "path," he is showing people that other paths are possible, and that those other paths may not neccessarily be unsafe to tread upon, nor is society harmed by his actions.

By so doing, he calls into question the legitimacy of the moral boundaries he has violated, and hence, the competence and legitimacy of the moral authorities who established them. Since moral boundaries are the very essence of conservative politics, the very basis of conservatism itself is brought under implied threat.

As serious as that is, the threat goes beyond even that: When the "deviant" treads his forbidden path, and not only gets away with it, but ends up living a happy, fulfilled and contented life with no harm done to himself or society, the conservative himself feels cheated, in having observed a set of boundaries which have proven to be unneccessary and arbitrary. And in doing so, he feels cheated of his own freedom of action, even if he had not himself bumped up against those particular boundaries. The conservative thereby feels he is being implicitly invited to abandon those moral boundaries and join the "deviant" in accepting increased freedom by rejecting moral authority. Fear that others may reject these apparently arbitrary moral boundaries, and hence question those who decreed them, and cause society to fall apart, is the reason for the conservatives' deep paranoia about the mythical "gay recruiting" and the equally mythical "gay agenda." Hence, conservatives have a deep emotional investment in keeping gays repressed through the maintenance of this particular set of moral boundaries, just as they did in maintaining their moral boundaries underlying racial segregation in the Deep South a generation ago and slavery a century before that.

How then should conservatism, as a political movement and a way of life, come to grips with the reality of gay marriage? In precisely the same way that it has come to grips with its errors with regards to racial segregation: own up to its mistake, and simply expand its moral boundaries to include gays and gay marriage. Just as most older conservatives now acknowledge that they once erred in "keeping blacks in their place," they should make the same acknowledgement for gays and their right to marry, and live happy, open and contented lives in each other's arms, without fear or discrimination - that gays are just as entitled to the equal protection of the law as anyone else, and the 14th Amendment to the U.S. constitution means what it says and applies to gays as well. No "slippery slopes," no "slouching towards Gomorrah", no "end of civilization as we know it"; just freedom, liberty and justice for all."