In the News: Debates About Rights Are About People, More on What-about-Children?! and I'm-Not-a-Homophobe-But Arguments

(As the day goes on): sorry for the hiatus in my blogging today. As my previous post indicated, I intended to note some more newsworthy (to me, that is, and I hope to you) stories that have caught my eye the past day or so. And then life got in the way of blogging, with a trip I had to take to do some business, and I'm only now back at my computer. So here's the rest of today's story:

Americans Talk Religion, Morality, Discrimination, Law: Commentary on Supreme Court Prop 8 and DOMA Hearings

A miscellany of articles (in addition to those to which I've already linked) that have caught my attention in the past several days, all spurred by the Supreme Court prop 8 and DOMA hearings, with brief excerpts:

Rights for Me and Thee: Howard University Files Amicus Brief Supporting Marriage Equality

Uh-oh. As I just noted, one of the most predictable tactics of the hard right in the U.S. (including not a few U.S. Catholic bishops) is to seek to play the rights of one targeted minority against another targeted minority--to play the ancient politics of divide et impera to control minority groups by setting them one against another. 

Forbidden Marriages, and States' Rights: A Story from the Past

Here's a case drawn from my research into my family's roots, which illustrates the kinds of tangles that can develop when one state permits couples of a certain sort to marry, while another state refuses to recognize marriages legally enacted in states permitting couples of a certain sort to marry:

Andrew Sullivan on North Carolina's 1875 Constitutional Amendment: Historical Lessons Not to Forget

And speaking of the long, hard struggle that has attended every human rights breakthrough in American culture; and speaking of the price that had to be paid by many people of conscience for many years to obtain equal rights for African-American citizens of the U.S., as principles-lite liberals sat on the fence and pontificated from their perches of "objective," "centrist," uncommitted superiority:

Tribal Catholicism Still Going Strong with Anti-Contraceptive Politicking

And, to add sociological depth to what I just posted about the disconnect between Jesus, the gospels, and what some Catholics today want to do and say about issues of contraception and abortion, two significant articles that have caught my eye in the past day or so:

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."

More News from the Week: A Fantasia about Bishops' Apologies for Catholic Homophobia, and Mr. Lori Testifies Before Congress

Bishop Lori Testifying Before House Judiciary Subcommittee, 25 Oct. 2011

Other read-worthy articles from the previous week I'd like to recommend to readers:

Continuing the Discussion of Family: An Historical Perspective

At the risk of being immodest (but also because I don't seem to find much of substance about which to blog this morning), I thought I might mention an article of mine that has recently won an award (the link points to a pdf file, for readers who need to know that information in advance).  I've mentioned this article in the past, both because it won a previous award from the state historical association for the best article published about local and family history in the past year.  The award it has now won is best family history article of 2010, from the Arkansas Genealogical Society.

Missouri Congresswoman Stuck in 1967, re: Marriage Rights

Republican Congresswoman from Missouri, Vicky Hartzler, told a conservative gathering in D.C. last month that permitting same-sex marriage is akin to permitting polygamy, incest, and three-year-old drivers.  And then she added: 

Anniversary of Loving v. Virginia Approaches: Joan Walsh on Marriage Equality

Joan Walsh represents the good face of American Catholicism, the face of the large majority of American Catholics who support the civil rights of LGBT people, including the right to marriage.  The lay face, as opposed to the hierarchical face.

John Allen on Cardinal George as U.S. Bishops' Thinker-in-Chief: Eugene Kennedy Responds (Say Whaaa?!)

Yesterday, I noted a lecture that the outgoing president of the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Conference, Cardinal Francis George, gave in December at Boston College.  As I indicated, in his remarks at Boston College, George stated that supporters of same-sex unions have "lost touch" with humanity.  

Placing God on the Side of Cruelty: America's History of Denying the Right of Marriage in God's Name

So I’ve spent the week thinking about marriage. And what happens when people are married, but their legally sanctioned marriage is not recognized outside the place in which they married. I’ve spent this week thinking about what happens to families when people with a religious animus against marriages they do not understand or accept have free rein to repudiate marriages abhorrent to them. And to punish the families that result from such marriages.

These are, unfortunately, not merely abstract questions. They’re very real American questions. Our nation has a history of permitting people who claim to be inspired by the gospels to upend the marriages of those they do not accept or like, and to make the lives of the families of such couples miserable.

I’ve noted before on this blog that I’ve been spending time in the past year researching and writing about a family story that I’ve teased out of old letters and bible records in the past several years. This is a story of a white Southern planter who “married” (but could not legally marry) a free woman of color, had a family by her, lived most of his adult life with her, and then bequeathed his land to one of his biracial sons.

As I’ve also said here, that son was murdered in 1899 in a week in which black men were lynched across south Arkansas, where he lived after inheriting his father’s land. He was shot in the back while riding horseback through woods on his land. A black man, a former slave, was charged with this crime. I have not been able to discover what happened to that man. I believe he was innocent of the crime and was framed by the white men who, in my view, almost certainly lynched a man of mixed race whom his white father had dared to acknowledge as a son, and to whom he left valuable property.

As I say, I’ve spent the last week thinking about marriage, and about what happens when people—good Christian people, whose lives are framed by the gospels and who care intently about others and about their pain—use tricky, dishonest, shameful, and cruel legal mechanisms to sort real marriages from bogus ones, real families from illicit ones.

I’ve been thinking about this question and how it haunts American history because, in the past week, I’ve discovered new documents that illuminate the life of my murdered relative from the period in which he received property from his father, up to the point of his murder in 1899. His father died in 1883.

At that point, my cousin moved with his wife—a white woman descended from prominent New England abolitionist families who had moved to Ohio, where they founded churches and worked in the Underground Railroad—and their six children from Ohio to Arkansas, to live on the 1200 acres he had received from his father. In Arkansas, the couple had three more children.

And then the wife died tragically young. She was forty-one. I have no information about what caused her death. This death has to have been exceedingly difficult for her young husband to bear. It left him with nine children to raise, their ages ranging from 18 to less than a year old.

And the response of the state when my cousin's wife died? The response of his good churchgoing neighbors to this tragedy affecting a young father and his nine young children?

Here’s what I have discovered took place when the wife of my cousin died in 1890: though this couple had legally married in Ohio in 1870, their marriage was not recognized in Arkansas. It was not recognized in Arkansas because Arkansas did not recognize the marriage of a person of color to a white person.

Arkansas had laws that forbade the marriage of people of different races. Those laws were informed by—they had everything to do with—the peculiar religious views of a majority of Arkansans, who believed that God had created the various races of the world to live separate from each other, to remain apart from each other, not to mingle through sexual union or marriage.

Well, this was the official understanding of such issues in Arkansas at the time, as it was the official understanding of the entire American South—and, truth be told, of much of the nation—at the time. In reality, the races had mingled for years, when white people found no theological problem at all in transgressing the lines separating white folks from folks of color as they brought enslaved Africans to this country to work for them.

And as we know well from many documents during the slave period, not only did white people find it perfectly possible to overcome their theological objections to racial mixing when it came to importing and using African slave labor in the United States, but they also found it eminently possible to overlook those objections when it came to certain matters of fact that ensue when one mixes people of one race with another in systems of forced labor that subject people of one race to people of another race: as anyone could have predicted, the forced enslavement of Africans and their importation to the American colonies immediately resulted in racial mixing that continued throughout the slave period. Mixing in which white masters, for the most part, forced black women enslaved to them to submit to their sexual advances and to bear their children.

As I say, the official understanding of racial relations enshrined in the law of states like Arkansas in the 1890s conveniently overlooked the actual history of racial relations for several centuries in the United States, as it forbade the legal marriage of people of different races. This official understanding conveniently clutched at a handful of carefully chosen biblical passages that supported its cynical and cruel denial of the right of marriage to mixed-race couples, while conveniently ignoring the plethora of texts (about love, justice, and mercy) that exposed the white majority’s refusal to permit interracial marriage as hypocritical and, well, cynical and cruel.

And so here’s what happened when my cousin’s wife died in 1890 in Arkansas. Because my cousin was a man of color, and because his wife had been white, the state refused to acknowledge that the two had been husband and wife. Though the state of Ohio had recognized them as a legally married couple twenty years previously . . . .

This meant, of course, that the children of this legally married couple were illegitimized by Arkansas law. Since their parents were not recognized as legally married in Arkansas—since they could not be legally married in Arkansas (or anywhere in the American South, or in most states of the Union) at the time—their father had to appeal for guardianship when his wife died. He had to appeal for guardianship of his own children. Of his own legal children. Of his own heirs.

He had to go to court, pretending to be a disinterested party who, for whatever reason, had an interest in the well-being of these nine children, and swear with witnesses who gave bond along with him that he would see to the care and education of these orphaned minors. The court documents giving him guardianship of his own children never once mention that he was their father. They could not mention this, without making a mockery of the entire proceedings—of the bizarre requirement that a father petition for the guardianship of his own children.

As if he had been nothing at all to their mother—certainly not her husband. As if he were nothing at all to these children—certainly not their father.

As if he and his wife had not been married but “married.”

As they in fact were in Arkansas at this period—and as they were in the eyes of a majority of Americans at this point in time. “Married.” Certainly not married.

And then nine years later he was murdered.

And I wonder how much has changed in the century or so following these tragic events, which made the life of this family (and of similar families) exceptionally painful. Unnecessarily painful. Painful in the name of God.

I wonder what has changed with the churches, in particular. Whether they’ve learned, many of them, that inflicting such pain on human beings who want merely to love one another and provide for one another is atrocious.

And even more atrocious when we claim to be inflicting that pain in the name of God.

The picture is a picture of my cousin as a young man, around the time of his marriage in 1870.

Gay Rights and Black Rights as Essentially Different: New Neocon Meme

Ali Frick reports today on Alternet re: the “newly popular conservative trope” echoed by Rev. Mike Huckabee, Baptist minister and former governor of Arkansas, on “The View” (ABC) earlier this week (www.alternet.org/blogs/video/107698). As Frick notes, when asked about gay rights, Huckabee stated that gay rights are a different set of rights—that is, a different set from the bona fide civil rights of African Americans.

Huckabee goes on (astonishing move on his part, about which more in a moment) to endorse some civil rights for gay Americans, while setting those rights aside as special rights essentially different from the rights enjoyed by African Americans. Gay rights are different, he argues, because they involve a request to redefine a social institution, the institution of marriage:

People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want. But that’s not really the issue. I know you talked about it and I think you got into it a little bit early on. But when we’re talking about a redefinition of an institution, that’s different than individual civil rights.

When Pat Behar responds that segregation was, after all, also a social institution, one that had to be redefined by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Huckabee responds that there is still an essential difference between gay civil rights and the rights of African Americans. He locates that difference in a violence test: gay Americans have not endured the same levels of violence that African Americans have withstood:

But here is the difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma bridge.

As Frick notes (and as I’ve been predicting on this blog), this hateful gay-vs.-blacks argument is in line to become the new neoconservative meme following the recent elections. Republicans are working fast and furious to reposition themselves as the party advocating for people of color vs. gay Americans, hoping to drive a wedge between the two minority groups and recapture the loyalty of American swing voters in the process.

Frick notes (as I have done) how quickly right-wing Christian Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has jumped on the blacks-vs.-gays bandwagon, maintaining that the rights of the two groups are “totally different.” As has African-American journalist Tara Wall, who maintains in an op-ed piece in the Washington Times on 18 Nov. that “[t]here is no comparison” between the struggle of the two communities for rights, because gay Americans have not endured stoning and lynching, and have always had a seat at the table if they are white (http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/nov/18/a-marriage-mandate).

As Brent Hartinger notes today on Afterelton.com, gay bashing is essentially all the Republican party has left, following the recent elections (www.afterelton.com/biggaypicture/11-20-2008). Hartinger identifies compelling parallels between the GOP’s rapidly developing cynical strategy of targeting gay citizens to regain heartland voter loyalty, and the Southern Strategy by which the Republican party captured white Southerners from Nixon forward.

As he points out, the Southern Strategy deliberately capitalized on seething discontent among white Southerners as African Americans claimed rights in the 1950s and 1960s. South Carolina political activist Lee Atwater, the primary architect of the Southern Strategy, explicitly notes this as he describes the ongoing strategy used to gain white Southern GOP loyalty:

You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.’ By 1968 you can't say ‘n*gger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff (as cited by Hartinger).

As Hartinger notes, “Just as with the Southern Strategy, the Republicans will be completely disingenuous on the issue.” Completely disingenuous: Hartinger is absolutely correct.

Rev. Huckabee’s argument could not be more disingenuous. It incorporates layer after layer of duplicity. It is designed to mislead. It is designed to distort the real situation in which gay Americans live today. It is cynically fashioned to capitalize on resentment of people of color against their gay brothers and sisters—to manipulate African-American voters by using social resentment in precisely the way the Southern Strategy exploited white resentment of black people.

Astonishingly, people who a half century ago flocked en masse to the Republican party because of their resentment against African Americans now wish to paint themselves as the allies of African Americans, as they play people of color against gay people. And as they do so, using duplicitous arguments such as the following:

§ Huckabee states: People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want.

The truth is: gay citizens of Arkansas have no legal protection against discrimination in areas such as housing, unemployment, healthcare, estate benefits, hospital visitation rights, etc. In this respect, they are like millions of other gay Americans in similar places throughout the land.

As governor of Arkansas, Rev. Huckabee did nothing to promote or protect the civil rights of gay Arkansans. To the extent that he could, he combated those civil rights in every way possible. And he did so in collaboration with his political party, which has followed a path of resistance to gay rights consistently for decades now.

It is disingenuous in the extreme for Rev. Huckabee to claim now, when he and his allies want to remove the right of marriage from gay Americans, that he suddenly supports “every right” of gay Americans “in terms of their civil rights.” Those resisting gay marriage also oppose every other civil right for gay citizens, when it is possible for them to do so. Their strategy is to continue using gay marriage as the focal point of a movement of resistance to every right possible for gay citizens, and to use gay human beings in cynical battles to consolidate their political power.

§ Huckabee states: But when we’re talking about a redefinition of an institution, that’s different than individual civil rights.

The truth is: the civil rights of African Americans were gained only at the cost of redefining numerous social institutions, including slavery itself. The extension of civil rights in our nation has demanded the redefinition of institutions that actively thwarted the extension of rights to various marginalized groups.

Opponents of gay marriage like to maintain (falsely) that marriage is a social institution from time immemorial, which has always involved marriage of one man to one woman, and which has never changed. Slavery itself was, until its abolition, a social institution from time immemorial.

It had biblical sanction. Apologists for slavery in the South consistently argued that those trying to abolish slavery were undermining the authority of the bible, attacking biblical institutions and biblical morality. The bible (and religion) were used as long as possible to bolster the enslavement of people of color in the United States. A war had to be fought to redefine our institutions in order to prevent this malicious misuse of longstanding social tradition and of religion to support the denial of human rights to a whole group of citizens.

What is different—essentially different, as Rev. Huckabee maintains—about the situation of gay human beings today? About the use of religion and the bible? About illicit use of “venerable” tradition? About the application of misleading slippery-slope arguments which declare that if you depart from the bible and tradition in this area, all hell will break loose in other areas?

§ Huckabee states: But here is the difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma bridge.

The truth is: As Ali Frick notes, “To suggest that a civil rights movement must meet some sort of violence threshold is an incredibly dangerous argument — not to mention blind to the serious violence gay people have already suffered” (my emphases). Frick notes that FBI reports for last year indicate 16.6% of hate crimes in the U.S. were due to sexual orientation, and a study by University of California (Davis) in the same year found that 4 of 10 LGB Americans reported violence or crimes against their property due to their sexual orientation.

John Lewis got his skull cracked: has Rev. Huckabee really never seen a documentary about the murder of Matthew Shepard a decade ago? Has he read no news reports about this murder? If he had, surely he would have thought twice about using the skull-cracking argument, when Matthew Shepard’s skull was so badly crushed from repeated blows that doctors were unable to operate on him, as he died from injuries to his brain and brain stem from the smashing of his skull.

As I’ve noted before on this blog, there’s plenty of suffering to go around. Tragically, enough LGBT Americans are assaulted every year—solely because they are lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered—that one could easily mail Rev. Huckabee a picture a week of these battered and murdered citizens and still have plenty to dispense, if he wanted to educate himself about violence to gay citizens.

As someone who grew up in Arkansas at the same time I did, he should know that the mainstream media always underreported—and, often, covered up—acts of violence against black citizens. This has been a longstanding practice of the media throughout the South, and in much of the rest of the nation, as well. There is still a troubling inequity in how the media cover, say, the disappearance of a little girl from a white family of means, and the disappearance of an African-American girl from a family without means.

And it is no different with gay citizens. Our situation is exactly like that of people of color, in this regard. Citizens like Rev. Huckabee can profess ignorance of the numerous acts of violence perpetrated against LGBT Americans only because they do not trouble to educate themselves by going beyond mainstream media reports to sources that care to report these crimes.

In the final analysis, what Rev. Huckabee is doing is so draconian—so anti-Christian—because it seeks to elicit anger on the part of people of color by playing horrendous violence done to one group of citizens against horrendous violence done to another group of citizens—in both cases, due to inborn characteristics that ought not to set the groups apart as stigmatized others. Violence is violence, whether it is done to people of color or to gay Americans.

There is violence aplenty in our society to go around. The authentic response of people of faith to unmerited violence imposed on a stigmatized social group is to challenge and seek to halt such violence. Not to play the violence of a “moral and deserving" group against an “immoral and undeserving" one. Not to stir ugly social resentments based on unfounded stereotypes.

Mildred Loving had it right when she noted, not long before her death:

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the "wrong kind of person" for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people's religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people's civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about (my emphases).

One would expect Rev. Huckabee as a minister of the gospel to be preoccupied with loving. And to listen to Mildred Loving, an African-American who, out of the crucible of her own struggle for civil rights—for the human right to marry—intuitively recognized the equivalence of her struggle for human and civil rights, and that of gay Americans.

Faith In America: Challenging Bigotry Masquerading as Religious Truth

A recent email announcement from the organization Faith In America (see the list of links for this blog) contains some heartening news about how our justice system is continuing to connect the dots between racial and homophobic bigotry. Faith In America notes that California attorney Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), recently praised Faith In America for helping to connect the dots through a June 2007 press conference featuring Mildred Loving.

Mildred Loving was a plaintiff in the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia, which led to the abolition of laws forbidding interracial marriage. In June 2007, at a press conference sponsored by Faith In America, Mildred Loving issued a statement in which she said gay and lesbian Americans should not be denied the right to marry the person they love.

According to Shannon Minter, this statement had a significant influence on the thinking of the majority of California Supreme Court justices who recently struck down the state’s laws forbidding gay marriage. In one of the concurring opinions supporting the California Supreme Court decision, Justice Joyce L. Kennard echoed the logic of Loving v. Virginia to permit interracial marriage, as she argued:

The architects of our federal and state Constitutions understood that widespread and deeply rooted prejudices may lead majoritarian institutions to deny fundamental freedoms to unpopular minority groups, and that the most effective remedy for this form of oppression is an independent judiciary charged with the solemn responsibility to interpret and enforce the constitutional provisions guaranteeing fundamental freedoms and equal protection.

Mitchell Gold, founder of Faith In America, states,

We were most pleased to learn that the Loving statement played a role in helping the justices connect the dots between the injustice of bigotry and discrimination against minorities in the past and the injustice that exists today from the deep-seated hostility and prejudice toward gay and lesbian individuals that is so often justified by misguided religious teaching and tradition with religious institutions.

The plaintiffs' arguments in the case appealed to the most fundamental aspect of not only this case but for all efforts to allow gay and lesbian people to enjoy the same human dignity that all Americans have an inalienable right to enjoy. Nothing should be allowed to stand opposed to such a basic human right. And without doubt, the bigotry and prejudice behind opposition to just a basic human right should never be allowed to masquerade as religious truth.

The bigotry and prejudice behind opposition to just a basic human right should never be allowed to masquerade as religious truth: simple logic. Profound truth.

For more information on the connections between the struggle for the right of gay persons to marry, and the previous struggle for the right of interracial couples to marry, see www.faithinamerica.info/loving.php. The resources on this weblink of Faith In America include a video clip of civil rights leader Julian Bond speaking about the Loving decision and its connection to gay marriage.

Just a Cock-Eyed Optimist

And, on this day when California begins permitting gay couples to marry, a sign of hope: the picture to the left is from Saturday’s (14 June) Boston gay pride parade, in which Governor and First Lady Deval and Diane Patrick marched with their daughter Katherine, who recently came out as a lesbian. Refreshing and inspiring to see authentic family values in practice.

I also take hope today from an article I happened on earlier in the day—Roy Reed’s “Nellie Forbush’s Hometown.” Reed summarizes the outrage of playgoers when Nellie Forbush, a character in “South Pacific,” said her lines on a Long Island stage in 1957, proclaiming that she was from Little Rock. The reaction was driven by the fact that a week previous, mobs of white racists had assaulted those trying to integrate Central High School in Little Rock (see
http://www.lctreview.org/article.cfm?id_issue=10106306&id_article=48191561&page=1).

Reed concludes his overview of the controversy by noting how much has changed in a half century:

Nellie Forbush's town, half a century later, is utterly American. Nobody takes any notice of the integrated restaurants, restrooms, water fountains, and schools. Some of the big evangelical churches are racially mixed. The worst fear of the white supremacists has come to pass without rending the national fabric: interracial couples are seen in small but growing numbers all over Arkansas, frequently with the dreaded proof of miscegenation, the mixed-race children, all walking the aisles of the Wal-Mart stores. And American democracy, despite the prophecies of doom, keeps shambling along. Even in Little Rock.

I have no doubt that in coming weeks, we’ll hear just as many dire predictions about gay marriage rending the social fabric of the nation. Just as in 1957, those trying to stand athwart history and scream stop may resort to every dirty trick in the book to create precisely the social disorder they predict to follow, when gay people are permitted to marry.

We may—God forbid—even witness the kind of violence that was practiced by some of the goons in Southern states in 1957 to stop integration.

They may have had their say, but they did not get their way. History has proceeded along, making a huge detour around them, and, as Roy Reed says, even some churches in Little Rock are now (miracle of miracles) integrated.

The world went on then, when whites and blacks were allowed to mix and even eventually to marry, and it will go on again, once gay people are married. And looking at the picture of the Deval family proudly asserting that love trumps hate, I’m inclined to be a cock-eyed optimist about the new social developments in California.