Here's a little political/legal/human rights news to go with your fair trade Sunday morning coffee.
So, Prop 8, as you know, was a proposition brought before the Californian public in 2008 to add an amendment to the state constitution to read "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." No more gay marriage.
The public went to the polls, they voted as is both their right and their responsibility, and a slim majority of them chose to vote yes and restrict legal marriage in the state to that between a man and a woman. This sucks, is unfair to a minority in our country, and is, unfortunately, now law. California is not the first state to do this, and I am tragically sure it will not be the last.
However, California's significant and very vocal gay population and its supporters have chosen to exercise their constitutional right to take part in boycotts, pickets, and protests against companies and societies who donated to the Yes on Prop 8 campaigns. The information about who gave money to those campaigns (and to the No on 8 campaigns for that matter) are a matter of public record under the California state campaign-finance disclosure act.
Which, you can imagine, has made gay marriage opponents a little bit nervous.
So the Prop 8 guys called in their lawyers to protest the disclosure law, stating that if donors were to be publicly named, they would be subject to "harassment" from gay rights groups.
(In case you're wondering? Yes, you are legally allowed to picket, boycott, and peacefully assemble against any person or entity in the United States of America. And in California, too.)
This past week, I was pleased to hear that the district judge hearing the case in Sacramento dismissed it, commenting that donors' requests for anonymity should not trump California's authority to require "full and fair disclosure of everyone who's involved in these political campaigns." [HRC article and San Francisco Chronicle article]
I'm amused by this ruling because, as the HRC article states, it is kind of funny that the Prop 8 proponents (P8Ps?) are crying foul because they're being "harassed" by the very people whose rights they've just helped to take away.
And this, my friends, is why I both love and hate democracy. I love that we all have a chance to have our say (let's pretend that there really is fair access to voting in this country for a moment), but I hate that that sometimes means there will be more people who disagree with my vote than agree.
I now return you to your Super Bowl Sunday.
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The issue of equal rights for all people in America is one movement as yet not fully realized. Marriage is a civil right in a secular society. Just as voting discrimination was overturned, so must laws against the civil rights of Gay Americans be overturned. This is what happens when religion is allowed into civil affairs.
ReplyDeleteThis is what happens when ignorance plays at politics :-(
ReplyDeleteIt makes me really sad. I wonder how many years it will take till children view it the same way today's generation views the suffrage movement or civil rights and MLK jr. era.
You both hit on the important word in different ways: civil. Marriage in the United States (a nation for whom freedom of religion is writ in our constitution), as sanctioned by the government, needs to be a secular union. The very fact that we have the "defense of marriage" act is injecting religion into a place where it has no right.
ReplyDeleteA Muslim couple getting married in a mosque and getting a piece of paper from their local government and a Catholic couple getting married in their cathedral at a full Mass and getting a piece of paper from their local government have two totally different religious marriages and exactly the same legal marriage. Religious and civil marriages need to have nothing to do with each other.
Of course, the only real answer is to make all legal marriages "civil unions" instead. See, the anti-gay marriage people say that, sure, gay people can have their civil unions (maybe) and have all the rights that a married couple has (maybe), but they can't sully the word "marriage" with their relationships.
It would be interesting to see what would have happened if we'd called the legal component of marriage something else entirely, many, many moons ago.
Another interesting "problem" is polygamy. Should the government outlaw that kind of marriage? As far as I'm concerned, if, and I say if, the people involved are 18 the government has no right to dictate to polygamists. It's not something I would do, but a civil right will not always be something popular.
ReplyDeleteI actually have a problem with polygamy being considered a civil union at all. Regardless of my feelings about it (I believe it's immoral) or anyone else's for that matter, it's still a collective, and each person within it should be individually subject to both rights and penalties.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, if one person in said collective wants to divorce the collective, how are the assets divided? In a standard civil union contract, each party would be entitled to half the assets, but that's hardly fair to a collective of, say 5 people. The four remaining members of the collective would only get half of the goods and the one leaving would get the lion's share.
I think a civil union needs to be between two individuals, not multiple individuals. It's just easier for bookkeeping and for standard, clearly defined rights.
And you're right--civil rights are not always popular, and there are people who still think a marriage like the one that produced our current president (and the subsequent marriage that produced his sister) is fundamentally wrong and should be outlawed, but the fact of the matter is that that particular civil right has been enacted by all 50 states and ratified by our federal government and upheld by our courts, local, state, and federal.
The key is to keep pushing. Gay couples need to keep pointing out that they deserve the same rights as heterosexual couples. Not because a gay lifestyle should be accepted by all, but because the financial intertwinings of many gay couples are the same as those of straight couples and should therefore be subjected to the same rights and penalties.
Separate but equal is not equal. It's been upheld in our courts for other civil rights, and I think it should be for this one, too.
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