Another heavily Catholic nation has passed legislation to enact same-sex marriage, despite fierce opposition by the country’s Catholic hierarchy: today, the legislature of Argentina passed a bill permitting same-sex couples the same marital rights as heterosexuals enjoy.
And as Glenn Greenwald notes, the contrast between how this Catholic nation and the United States have chosen to handle the issue of human rights for gay and lesbian citizens is instructive: it provides a lesson to the U.S. about ourselves and our values. Though (or because?) the population of Argentina is over 90% Catholic, and though the Catholic bishops of Argentina fought hard against this same-sex marriage legislation, polls show that 70% of Argentinians support giving gay people the same marital rights as those afforded heterosexuals.
As Greenwald notes, in this nation with conservative political traditions, where dictatorships have been common up to the recent past,
Ending discrimination against same-sex couples is understood as a matter of basic equality, not social progressivism, and it thus commands widespread support.
In the United States, by contrast—a nation that touts itself as the leader of the democratic world, a nation that boasts of having the soul of a church—it is proving almost impossible to overturn a ban on military service by gay and lesbian citizens which is rejected by a solid majority of our citizens. And our political leaders bend over backwards to deny any support for same-sex marriage, even when our current president campaigned on a promise to end DOMA, noting that he regards its prohibition of same-sex marriage as discriminatory. In fact, as Laura Flanders noted at Alternet earlier this week, the White House has consistently played bait-and-switch games with its LGBT supporters, who turned out in record numbers in the last election to place Mr. Obama in office.
We’re not the people we imagine ourselves to be. As one “underdeveloped” Catholic nation after another (Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia) follows “developed” Catholic countries in Western Europe in granting marital rights to gay and lesbian citizens—in enacting legislation to protect the fundamental human rights of LGBT persons, something that Catholic social teaching encourages them to do (though the current regime excludes LGBT persons from its definition of human rights)—the United States lags far behind. Standing with Islamic fundamentalist groups, and with nations in the underdeveloped sectors of the world in which gay and lesbian persons are targets of growing violence.
As they are in the U.S., where the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs has just issued its report for 2009, showing that hate-inspired murders of gay citizens were at their second-highest rate in a decade last year, and hate crimes against LGBT citizens spiked after the passage of the federal hate crimes law.
How is this happening, when a Democratic president who campaigned while decrying discrimination against people on grounds of sexual orientation is in the White House, and when Congress has a Democratic majority? Those of us who voted for these leaders with high hopes that they intended to fulfill their promises have not only seen the promises repudiated.
But we’re now see that we’re susceptible to rates of violence higher than we endured under conservative, overtly anti-gay federal administrations. Something is wrong with this picture.
