Now that Dean is the DNC chair, the media is already trying to marginalize him, and the entire Democratic Party with him.
Dean is too left, he's polarizing, the Republicans are salivating and chortling. Remember, this is the same media that told us all throughout the campaign that Republicans felt Dean would have been a BETTER candidate than Kerry. Why the media persists in parroting the RNC line is beyond me.
On the issues, the conventional wisdom is that Dean is "out of step" on "values" issues. Among these issues are gay rights and abortion. And part of the conventional wisdom on gay rights is that black voters, a core Democratic group, are hostile to gay rights, particularly older black voters who are, we are told, culturally conservative. Stand up for gay rights and we will lose the black voters, says the media. Not to mention the values voters in red states.
In today's Washington Post, however, is a powerful and articulate refutation of this viewpoint, if only Democrats are willing to take Howard Dean's advice, and "stand up for what we believe in." Check it out on the flip.
Colbert King, columnist for the Post, wrote the following in today's Post. It is powerful, it is eloquent, and it is designed to appeal to African Americans who may not feel all that personally comfortable with gays and their issues. But it is also a powerful (and moral, not coincidentally) rebuke to those who say that marriage is a "sacred, divinely ordered" institution reserved only for one man and one woman. The emphasis is my own.
Marriage in the March of Time
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, February 12, 2005; Page A19
There's really no telling what the 29 black intellectuals who met 100 years ago in Niagara Falls would think of America today. Of course, the same might be said of Americans in the year 2105 who look back to see how we lived out our lives a century before. There's good reason, however, to believe that the 29 men, led by W.E.B. Du Bois, then a professor at Atlanta University, would hardly recognize this as the same country.
At the dawn of 20th-century America, those black men journeyed to Niagara Falls, N.Y., to prepare a militant statement on race and inequality that was to stand in sharp contrast to the conciliatory and accommodationist stance of Booker T. Washington -- white America's favorite black man at the time. Hotels on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls wouldn't let them register, however. So their demands were drafted in a hotel on the Canadian side of the falls.
The breadth of legally sanctioned segregation and discrimination 100 years ago remains a historical shame. But what will Americans 100 years down the road think when they examine our era?
In 1905, when the Niagara Movement -- forerunner to the NAACP -- was born, nowhere was the color line more heat-tempered and rock-hard than when it came to sex. The prohibition against interracial marriage was a national obsession, enshrined in both law and tradition.
Consider this: As early as 1664, Maryland earned the distinction of becoming the first colony to ban marriages between blacks and whites. The other southern colonies played catch-up in the decades that followed. They weren't alone. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts also joined the pack.
In the 19th century, interracial marriage was illegal in most states. As the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund noted in a brief in a New Jersey case, "by the 1960s, at least 41 states had enacted anti-miscegenation statutes."
The arguments mounted against interracial marriage also had a familiar ring. Fact and God played heavily in the judgments.
The Georgia Supreme Court in 1869 based its interracial marriage ban on natural law, observing that "the God of nature made it otherwise, and no human law can produce it, and no human tribunal can enforce it."
Hear the 1871 Indiana Supreme Court quoting an 1867 Pennsylvania decision: Racial separation is enacted not because of "prejudice, nor caste, nor injustice of any kind, but simply to suffer men to follow the law of races established by the Creator himself, and not to compel them to intermix contrary to their instincts."
The North Carolina Supreme Court in 1869 upheld the state's anti-race mixing law, stating that "the policy of prohibiting the intermarriage of the two races is so well established, and the wishes of both races so well known."
A host of state anti-miscegenation laws -- strongly backed by white public sentiment -- were upheld in state courts well into the 20th century. The reasoning was simple and absolute: Marriage between the races defied the natural order; intermarriage bans had legitimate historical roots and were based on a "divinely ordained" scheme. Conclusion: Government had the right to define marriage as a union of two persons of the same race.
It remained that way for generations, until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, ruled that state laws setting forth who can marry whom violate "one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men" -- marriage -- and the "principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment."
So much, therefore, for the ruling of the Virginia judge who, in 1959, had sentenced the interracial couple, the Lovings, stating: "Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
So much, too, for the unbending, firmly ingrained, immutable understanding enshrined in law and court rulings that interracial partners cannot marry.
Now fast-forward past today to 100 years from now. How will future generations view our present-day fight against allowing monogamous couples with life commitments to each other to marry? What will they think of our rush to enact state laws prohibiting same-sex life partners from joining the same institution shared by different-sex couples? How will they regard our assertion that there is a public interest in promoting discrimination in the marriage statute?
Let's get one issue out of the way before the e-mails and letters start flooding in. I don't equate the long, bloody struggle of African Americans against racial injustice, ugly brutality and unjust treatment with the effort to give equal rights to lesbians and gay men.
But I do believe that homosexuals are subject to prejudice and that they are forbidden the same rights and safeguards that heterosexuals enjoy, including the right to marry. That, in my book, is wrong.
There is justice to their cause that should be ours, too. Leaving the security of the majority to stand up and say so ought not be so hard in 2005. Sadly, for many Americans, it is. Just as it was 1905.
Wow. Powerful, eloquent and moving, a clarion call to African Americans to see the struggle for gay rights, at least in a legal sense, through the prism of the history of laws against miscegenation. King is careful not to equate discrimination against gays with racial discrimination, and I for one agree with him.
But the end result is the same? Do we want to be viewed as a society that stood on the wrong side of a moral issue for too long, or do we want to stand up for what is right and just and fair? Instead of knuckling under to the bigots and the zealots, who aren't going to vote for us anyway, why not stand up and challenge them to defend their bigotry and their hatred on the merits?
If the fear is that blacks and moderates will abandon us, this column is a powerful counterargument, from an older African American voice. It appeals not only to blacks, but to fair-minded liberals and moderates. Does anyone today think that anti-miscegenation laws were a good thing? How do we distinguish between the arguments put forward in favor of bans on interracial marriage and the arguments now being advanced in favor of banning gay marriage? Instead of running from the issue, why not meet it square on? Remember, one of the criticisms of Democrats in current polling is that it's not clear what we stand for. Here's a perfect chance to make it clear -- we stand for fairness, equality and dignity of all our citizens, regardless of gender, race, or sexuality. Those who oppose us are bigots and haters.
Dean is already on the record on gay rights. It's not new for him. Why is this not a great opportunity for him to turn the issue around, and to present the issue not as one of "values" as defined by the religious right, but the values of the entire country, that all of our citizens are entitled to respect, fairness and equality? Stand up, stand firm, and stand for what you believe in.