Recently, I've been really touched by the issue of marriage equality in California and across the nation. Before the passage of Proposition 8, I'll be honest, I was a supporter of marriage rights for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, but it wasn't one of the issues I was extremely passionate about. Not anymore.
Over the last few months, I've really felt compelled to do a lot on this issue and blog a lot about it, whether that's been on my FaceBook profile or my own blog. This diary is a culmination of both that, and a history lesson in conservative rhetorical opposition to any forms of equality, and how it applies in our current context, more accurately, how disturbing the parallels are in the rhetoric of inequality in every era. (Then again, that could be a lack of creativity on the part of conservatives, but I digress...)
Following the Mexican War, the rhetorical battle against slavery flared up in the United States as pro-slavery conservatives and anti-slavery progressives (and a few in between) argued as to what would become of slavery in the new territories acquired in the after math of that war. Conservatives of course, argued for an expansion of the machinery of inequality, while progressives fought tooth and nail to deny expansion of slavery.
In the end though, a "compromise" was reached when a conservative leaning centrist, Stephen Douglas, suggested that the issue be left to the territories themselves to decide, a doctrine adapted from John C. Calhoun's 'states rights' to be dubbed 'Popular Sovereignty'. The result on the surface might have looked good to onlookers on both sides, but when the doctrine was applied in the newly admitted state of Kansas and that state adopted a Constitution banning slavery, pro-slavery forces wrote their own Constitution and a small scale civil war broke out in the state. For all of their rhetoric about letting the state decide, the conservatives decided not to stomach the state's decision and fought to overturn it.
Call me crazy for making the comparison, but I feel that the doctrine of 'Popular Sovereignty' is alive and well in the modern Republican Party with regards to gay rights. Politicians like John McCain can talk about letting the states decide all they want, but in the end, they will work their damnedest to repeal a state's decision if it doesn't fall in their favor, as we saw in California. The comparison isn't exact (judicial ruling versus constitutional ratification), but I feel that there's enough common ground there to actually make the comparison.
We all know, in the end, what became of Stephen Douglas' popular sovereignty doctrine. The people voted in 1860 to bring the nation to terms with that question once and for all in electing Abraham Lincoln over Douglas himself, a pro-slavery conservative, and a "centrist" who favored the status quo. Yes, I realize that Lincoln wasn't the bastion of abolition when he was elected, but his election was also the sweeping election of anti-slavery progressives that rejected popular sovereignty outright as discriminatory and barbaric.
Fast forward to the bench of the Supreme Court thirty years later, when a conservative court declared that Jim Crow was legal under the
XIV Amendment so long as institutions were "separate but equal." This doomed a generation of people of color to discrimination and second class citizenship in my home region of the south, something that was not rectified until a progressive movement entangled the country and cried that this was not just.
In that same vein, I make the comparison of those who offer Civil Unions instead of Civil Marriage, well meaning they may be, are suffering from the same virus that is the belief that a people can be equal if they are separated, that a person can be treated as an equal if they are stigmatized to second class citizenship. That, in my opinion, is unjust, as well.
The rhetoric of conservatism that prevents equality while sounding "reasonable" to outsiders, rather than conservative rhetoric that sounds insane to your average man or woman, is the rhetoric that is the most threatening to the future of marriage equality in my opinion. The moment that we lose the ability to frame the debate and give into "reasonable" conservative rhetoric on this important issue is the moment that we risk losing the battle itself.
Arguments can be made that conservative arguments that are the most inflammatory, such as a constitutional ban on marriage equality, yet I will argue that these conservative arguments aren't likely the ones to pass. If there are any conservative arguments about marriage equality that are to prevail, it will be those that aren't the most inflammatory, those of compromise and further inequality.
Cross-posted at The Blue Eagle