Not that this was remotely a surprise.
Bush to support constitutional amendment prohibiting marriages between same-sex partners: President Bush backed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage Tuesday, saying he wants to stop activist judges from changing the definition of the "most enduring human institution." Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural and moral roots, Bush said, urging Congress to approve such an amendment. "After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization," the president said. "Their action has created confusion on an issue that requires clarity."
Millenia of human experience.
Hmm. Indeed.
I suppose it would be fruitless to point out to Our Glorious Shrub that those millenia of human experience have given the world very different forms of marriage. In many regions of the world, plural marriage is still the preferred form (although it does frequently have a nasty tendency to equate women with possessions -- the more the better). And Europe has managed to have gay marriages in several countries for a few years now, and somehow, you know, they're still there. Straight people still get married in Europe. Whatever it meant to them before gay people were included, it apparently still means that to most who choose to marry. I mean, really, whoda thunk?
At this point, in any event, the best hope is that the Federal Marriage Amendment continues to be bottled up in Congress. Really, from the politicians' point of view, for the next several months at least, this is the best possible option. People from moderate districts where this issue is still fairly divisive really won't want to take any more of a public position on this than they have, and they're the important ones here. The liberals and conservatives already have pretty well defined positions. Plus, as long as the amendment languages in Congress, the conservatives have a wonderful tool with which to batter their opponents; look what those nasty liberals have done! They're preventing you from voting on this!
I point out that there is a reason why most civil rights issues really don't come down to votes.
People don't want others to have the rights they enjoy.
Think this is overstating the issue? Look at what happened with the Equal Rights Amendment. Boiled down to its essence, all it said was, we think everyone ought to be treated equally whether they're men or women. That's it. Yet it ran into a buzzsaw of opposition, based on people's fears that they would, in fact, be required to do just that, and they didn't want to. Texas and Tennessee passed the amendment, and then turned around and said, "Um, you know that amendment we just ratified? Yeah, we changed our minds. We're recinding it. We really don't think women should be treated equally with men. No, really, we don't."
That's not a particularly special case. The Civil War amendments would never have been passed if the government hadn't essentially been holding the Southern states at gunpoint-- and at that, the Northern states weren't happy about a couple of them. There wasn't all that much involved for the Northern states in passing the Thirteenth amendment, or so they thought; after all, they didn't have slavery, and abolishing it was the public reason for fighting the entire Civil War in the first place, so what's the big deal in officially abolishing it? The Fourteenth Amendment was considerably more difficult -- the Northern states didn't want all those free blacks wandering around any more than the Southern states, and they sure as hell didn't want them as citizens -- and the Fifteenth Amendment was basically the government saying, "So, you know those two previous amendments? We mean them. No, really, we do. REALLY." The latter two would likely not have made it through had the Southern states any choice in the matter, but during Reconstruction, their state governments were essentially held hostage; they had little choice but to ratify.
This isn't even the first time that the nation's parochial views on marriage have been forced onto another state's public policy. Utah was forced to explicitly repudiate plural marriage in their state constitution before they would be accepted as part of the union. An issue that affected nobody outside Utah, and as gratuitous a bit of Mormon bashing as ever there was.
So no. When it comes to anything remotely resembling a civil right, the body politic does not want to expand those rights, and usually has to be forced into doing so. Eventually, it sees that the expansion of those rights has harmed nobody, but it will not -- without a very large gun being pointed at its head -- vote to grant them in the first place.
If nothing else, it will be terribly interesting to see how some people and organizations respond to this. (The Log Cabin Republicans have to be having conniption fits.)
Posted by iain at February 24, 2004 11:24 AM
