AF&Opourri, Marriage Equality Edition

What do fellow bloggers have to say about same-gender marriage in light of the Resident’s finally stated desire to write bigotry into the US Constitution? As one might imagine, they are not staying silent.

Pandagon gets right to the heart of the matter, showing the fallacy in the traditional view that God is against gays.

I don’t mean to merely invoke Jesus’s warnings to refrain from judgment; I mean to argue that the Bible doesn’t address homosexuality with the specificity nor clear condemnations that the Christian Right claims.

Do see how Ezra Klein makes the case for a Bible intepretation fundies would call heresy.

At Some Grrrls, Astridiana comments on Rosie O’Donnell’s nuptials, noting that the former talk-show host’s new marriage has several things going for it: Rosie’s got the fame, the stones, and the bank to take on Bush’s bigotry in court. As Astridiana says, “If we can get a statement on this from Oprah, I think Bush better just back down.” And best of all, a loving couple had their union and family recognized in the city of San Francisco. Yeah, baby!

Meanwhile — and disappointingly — PoliBlog waves the flag for Jim Crow.

The bottom line is that “marriage” has had a very specific meaning historically and certainly within American public policy and society. If the goal is simply to provide a means for homosexual partners to achieve legal equality, then let’s go the civil union route and stop the culture war routine. Polls suggest that a large swath of the public would support that position, including some evangelical Christians such as myself, and it would avoid the marriage issue.

Yes, the debate is, to some degree, over semantics. However, words do matter and the word “marriage” matters to a lot of people and it is undemocratic, and unrealistic, for those persons to be ignored. We aren’t taking about Jim Crow, or second class citizen status, we are talking about trying to find a public policy compromise between a very small minority of persons and what is a large plurality, if not a majority, of the population. God Bless America, if I may be so bold as to use that phrase in this context, that despite the rancorous nature of the debate that a small minority could receive this much attention and not be trampled.

Actually, Jim Crow is exactly what the author is supporting, second-class citizenship IS what GLBT people endure in America, and denying equality for people is far worse than mere trampling.

Happily moving on, the new blog Rain Storm calls the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment what it is: “The Unequal Rights Amendment” and suggests that we all do just that. I’m in.

ExGay Watch reports on how bloggers and an ex-gay leader who supports the Unequal Rights Amendment see the marriage debate. Editor Mike Airhart answers a valid question: “Why is it that when anti-abortion demonstrators commit illegal actions to protect unborn children, they are likened by the Christian Right to martyrs, but when couples get married, they are likened to Nazis and antidemocratic anarchists? I sense a double standard here.”

This has been a year of discovery for gay conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan. First, he came to some painful realizations regarding his beloved Roman Catholic Church. Now, thanks to his boy Bushie’s trumpeting of the Unequal Rights Amendment, Sully has come to a new understanding of the selected White House Republican:

The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. Rather than allow the contentious and difficult issue of equal marriage rights to be fought over in the states, rather than let politics and the law take their course, rather than keep the Constitution out of the culture wars, this president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens – and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. … Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth.

Better late than never, eh?

Over at Marriage Debate, Eve Tushnet (who is anti-legal gay marriage for religious reasons) gives readers the opportunity to see a number of answers to her question asking whether the fight for same-gender marriage is the next civil-rights movement.

San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is today’s Rosa Parks. Same-sex marriage is this generation’s interracial marriage. Opponents of SSM are fighting the same kind of bigoted battle as the opponents of desegregation–and will be viewed, by their descendants, with the same shock and disdain.

That’s one story of the relationship between the SSM movement and the black civil rights movement. Mark Riordan makes that case here: “When bigotry-based lawmaking was all the rage during the earlier part of last century, race mixing, at least for marital purposes, was seen as being so immoral that 31 of 48 states criminalized it to protect, you got it, the sanctity of marriage.”

But there’s another story, a counternarrative. Debra J Saunders calls Newsom “Rosa Parks–not.”

Dick Richardson, political affairs director of the Black Ministerial Alliance of Boston, writes: “We have found that every child has an innate need to connect with a mother and father. Children instinctively seek a connection to both halves of the human race.”

The reasons for these two clashing narratives aren’t hard to discern. Racism has always been the American trauma–the founding sin–and so there’s a tendency to map every kind of human difference onto race. The civil rights movement has one of the most honored legacies in American political life. We are trained to view restrictions based on difference with deep suspicion.

But at the same time, the black community is struggling to deal with an enormous problem of father absence. Black leaders, especially clergy and family groups, see the recovery of black fatherhood and the black family–mom and dad married with kids–as one of the most pressing issues facing the community. Many view SSM as a change that would destabilize that norm, downgrading the importance of fathers and delinking marriage and parenthood; and so, far from being the next civil rights battle, the push for SSM appears as a grave threat.

Who is right?

I recommend checking out the views of Jonathan Rauch, Michael Triplett, and Gabriel Rosenberg. Kudos to Tushnet for looking at and exposing a variety of viewpoints.

When it comes to marriage equality, Aaron at Uppity Negro says there is nothing to debate. Hear, hear.

I believe that this fight for marriage equality is all about justice and making America live up to what it claims to be. To that end, I think Dru Blood is darn close to being spot on.

I don’t think that people pushing the ban are going to be swayed by an argument about the “sacredness” of the constitution. The way to beat back the Right is to expose them as bigots and to put gay marriage in the terms of a broader fight for Civil Rights.

The Democrats should be out there saying, “Separate but equal is not equal.”, “Marriage rights for all.”, “George Bush is a bigot.”, etc. Where are the teeth?

If you’re looking for teeth, cojones, whatever, the Democratic Party is not the place to look, sad to say.

I love this from Thomas Nephew, a friend and fellow Marylander from the thoughtful centrist/right-leaning Newsrack Blog:

Maybe it’s the blogging echo chamber, but I think the Bushies have outsmarted themselves. Bush has certainly irrevocably lost what respect I had for him. But more importantly, remember that these are people who snuck in to office four years ago on a wing and a prayer. I think the last thing a lot of those last 4 or 5% of Bush’s voters want to be reminded of is what a tool for the Christian Right Bush is; if this FMA goes forward, they’ll be reading about it day after day after day. As Josh Marshall and others have pointed out, it’s interesting that DeLay and others in the Republican leadership are making “maybe not right now” sounds.

Me quoting Instapundit? Who’d a-thunk it? I rarely darken that site’s doorstep, but today I followed a link on Thomas’ site and it took me to the notorious Glenn Reynolds, who was speaking sense: After a great deal of consideration, he had concluded that he opposes the Unequal Rights Amendment.

I know plenty of gay people who are, for all practical purposes, married. I don’t see what’s wrong with them getting married. I don’t understand how letting gay people get married threatens heterosexual marriage. And, in fact, I suspect that to the extent it makes any difference at all, gay marriage will prove to be a fundamentally conservative institution, with married gays taking the role of solid citizens that married people have traditionally taken.

I think that the country will figure that out, and sooner than many people think. I also think that the country ought to be given a chance to figure it out, and not be prevented from doing so by a constitutional amendment.

I can’t believe I’m typing this, but… from your fingers to God’s ear, Glenn.

Finally this, from Nate Knows Nada:

I believe that my political and spiritual duty — and I hope yours too — lies in standing up for the principles of justice and mercy.

What the president does is unjust. It denies people — citizens — of their right to equal treatment under law. It lies in the same moral plane as anti-Semitism and racism. It refuses to affirm the dignity, equality, and worth of all human beings. What the president does is not only unjust; what the president does is sin; what the president has done is to fall prey to evil.

Despite the blog’s name, it appears Nate knows plenty.

A tip o’ the baseball cap and lots of love to all the bloggers out there working for equality for all, standing up for justice and mercy. You have my eternal gratitude.