1967 or 2012? John Aravosis on NOM Response to Prop 8 Ruling in California

I like John Aravosis's take on the National Organization for Marriage's denunciation of the recent California court ruling finding proposition 8 unconstitutional.  Aravosis's headline reads, "Could Have Been Written in 1967."

And he's right.  NOM is hyperventilating right now, with claims that high-handed federal judges have taken it on themselves to be "supreme overlords of the people" intent on overruling what the majority believes.  NOM's response to the prop 8 ruling asks, "After all, how can federal judges redefine something that man didn't create?"

And as John Aravosis correctly suggests, this is precisely how many people in the American South, whose strongly held religious convictions led them to oppose interracial marriage, reacted to the Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967 overturning state bans on marriage across racial lines.  Overturning state bans on marriage across racial lines firmly grounded in deep religious convictions of white Southerners (and many other Americans held for centuries . . . .

As Virginia judge Leon Bazile, who found Richard and Mildred Loving guilty of violating miscegenation laws in 1959, and who sentenced them prison for their crime (they were permitted to move from the state as a substitution for the prison sentence) said in sentencing them, 

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.

This is why the atavistic tribal Catholic argument pushing the premise that if Catholics do it, it must be right, leaves me absolutely unmoved.  As does the atavistic tribal Catholic argument that if Catholic leaders say it, it must be right.

I grew up in a world in which almost every religious leader I knew, and all the good Christian people around me, firmly held the same principles that Judge Bazile articulated in that 1959 sentencing statement.  And they (and we) were utterly wrong, as it turns out.

I remember vividly signs calling for Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren's impeachment in the late 1950s and 1960s.  They sprang up on roadways all over the South after the Brown v.  Topeka Board of Education decision striking down legalized racial segregation of public schools.  I heard plenty of talk about high-handed activist judges and the will of the people (and God's blessing on the tribe and what the it wanted) as I grew up.

And as a result, I'm not impressed by the tribalistic Catholic arguments that NOM and Catholic centrists sling around unthinkingly these days, which imply that if I belong to any given tribe, that tribe simply can't be wrong.  Or can't misrepresent God.  

I don't forget, when I see the acronym NOM, that this group is headed by Maggie Gallagher,* a Catholic, and it has very thick ties to Catholic groups including Opus Dei.  I don't forget that NOM has worked hand-in-hand with the Catholic bishops in the bishops' campaign to remove or block the right of civil marriage for same-sex couples.  I don't forget NOM's collaboration with the Catholic church in Maine in a dirty anti-gay campaign several years ago that even its coordinator, Marc Mutty, has characterized as unconscionable after the fact.  I don't forget that NOM is working closely with the Catholic bishops of Minnesota right now to write the kind of anti-gay discrimination just declared unconstitutional in California into Minnesota's constitution.

I don't forget any of this as leading American Catholic journals of the political and intellectual center demand that I respect and obey my bishops so that their voice of conscience is not muted in the public square.  As I said yesterday, if anyone had told me when I chose to become Catholic at a point in history when many Catholics courageously defended human rights in the Civil Rights movement, where the community I chose as my community of faith in the 1960s would have decided to move by the first decades of the 21st century, I'd have scoffed.  But here we are.

And we're here precisely because of the craven, dishonest refusal of Catholics of the center to be honest about issues of sexual ethics (and human rights) for years now, and because of the craven, dishonest refusal of Catholics of the center to call the bishops to accountability for their dismal pastoral leadership.  We're here because tribalism trumps conscience, careful thought, and strong values for too many American Catholics in this restorationist moment of Catholic history.

*It occurs to me I have made a misstatement here.  I believe Maggie Gallagher has now stepped down and Brian Brown leads NOM.  I suspect, however, that just as I did with this comment, many folks continue to identify NOM and its leadership primarily with M. Gallagher.