So much for loving thy neighbor
Unintentional irony at the heart of D.C. ‘Marriage Initiative’
By MARK LEVINE
Nov. 06, 2009
THE FIVE-HOUR hearing last Monday before the D.C. Board of Elections & Ethics seemed interminable, and the arguments from proponents of the so-called Marriage Initiative ranged from the absurd to the offensive to the pathetic. The question before the board was whether a proposal by a Maryland pastor to deny gay people the right to civil marriage (and forcibly divorce those D.C. couples already married) violated District law, which prohibits any referendum that would have the effect of "authorizing discrimination" against D.C. residents on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender.
Seemingly oblivious to the legal standard — that the D.C. Code, unlike, say California’s laws, actually bars a majority vote on a minority’s civil rights — person after person rose to testify to the patient, if astonished, board that gay people deserved no more civil rights than a "goldfish," a "cobra," or a "family pet."
"Let us vote," they thundered, citing everything from the Civil Rights Movement to Martin Luther King, with no apparent understanding that the majority of Alabama and Mississippi voters in the 1960s opposed civil rights for African Americans. Did they even know that it was the Constitution of the United States — enforced by people of good will of all colors, religions, and sexual orientations — that trumped the bigoted majority of that time? Did they realize that the primary organizer of the March on Washington was a gay man, Bayard Rustin? Or that King stood up for him at a time when being gay was a criminal offense?
Apparently not. Unintentional irony ruled the day. At least twice, Pontius Pilate was cited as an example for the board. "Wash your hands of this. Let the people decide!" they cried. Were these regular Sunday-church goers really unaware that, in the gospels, the mob in Jerusalem voted to pardon the thieves and crucify the man they worshipped as God? Was this the vote they sought to emulate?
Emmanuel Mutangana spoke movingly of his escape from Rwandan genocide, but then demanded a majority vote on civil rights in D.C., seemingly oblivious to the fact that the majority of his Hutu countrymen supported the murder of those in his Tutsi tribe. Should his death have been voted on? Corinthia Boone spoke in ways that would make George Wallace proud. Helen Trice opined that her 37-year marriage would be meaningless if two gay people — presumably unknown to her — were also allowed to share in an equivalent happiness. Was Trice afraid that her loving husband of 37 years would run off with a buddy of his if gay people were given the same rights to marry that she had? If not, what exactly was she afraid of?
ONE MAN CAME all the way from Massachusetts, armed with children’s books to show how his child had been indoctrinated in that state with knowledge that gay families existed. How dare the public schools inform his children of the truth? Was this man even aware that some public-school books in the 1950s admitted that interracial married couples existed at a time when such race-mixing was banned in the majority of states? That people like him also complained about such books at that time? And that our current president was the offspring of such a marriage, still illegal in more than a dozen states in the year of his birth?
One anti-gay testifier expressed fear, in all apparent seriousness, that her address might be made public. More unintentional irony. Was she not aware of the numbers of gay people brutally beaten every year in D.C. solely for their sexual orientation? Did she really fear a marauding band of gays might, for the first time ever in American history, "straight-bash" her?
Another woman patiently explained to me that the 60-odd people who testified against equal rights for gay people — using exactly the same arguments used in the early 1960s against equal rights for African-Americans — did not hate gay people. They just feared gay people, she said. They were not homophobic. I didn’t have the heart to tell her what "homophobic" meant.
All the "Marriage Initiative" crowd wanted was to vote on the marriages of people they have never met. But would they have subjected their own marriages to public plebiscite?
AS THE ATTORNEY for the District of Columbia’s largest GLBT civil rights organization, I used the five minutes I was allotted to focus on legal arguments rather than emotional rhetoric. I reminded the board that the public policy of the District was equal rights for all, that times had changed since 1977 when marriage equality for gay people was a pipe dream, and that the same Congress that promulgated the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution also authorized segregation in D.C. schools, but that did not stop its guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" from ending segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.
I knew the board, to its credit, fully understood that it had no discretion to ignore the obvious dictates of D.C. law. But I wondered if my testimony was even heard by the proponents of the initiative. I told them, as I have repeatedly told the Maryland pastor who sponsored the initiative, that I would be honored to come to his or their churches to explain, even before a hostile audience, why I believe all Americans are entitled to equal rights under the law.
But most of the phalanx of fervent churchgoers who thundered angrily about their First Amendment rights to speak their mind had left the room rather than be subjected to the indignity of logical counter-argument. And I was not surprised when not a single anti-marriage-equality church took me up on my offer of dialogue.
By the end of the hearing, it seemed that the only people left trying to destroy people’s marriages was the Alliance Defense Fund. Their well-heeled attorneys conceded the marriage initiative sought to undo and forcibly divorce hundreds of legally married couples in the District. If that was "irreparable harm," so be it. (Subtext: It’s not like these gay citizens had the same rights as full, red-blooded American Christians anyway.)
I left wondering if the Religious Right had ever heard of another passage in Leviticus: the one about loving thy neighbor as thyself. And I was thankful I lived in a country that still upheld the Constitution and the rule of law — not under the Taliban, where a particular conception of religion could be established as law to punish heretics.
But then I came home and read the manifesto of Bob McDonnell, Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, whose compelling "vision for the family" at the Christian Broadcasting Network University was to punish homosexuals, feminists, fornicators, working women, and other sinners. And I prayed that one day, Virginia would be as enlightened as the District of Columbia, where a majority has no power to tyrannize a minority and where all men and women are created equal in the eyes of the law.
Cross-Posted to The Washington Blade here.