DOMA: Defense of WHAT?
May 26, 2008
Massachusetts authorized gay marriage and guess what? Massachusetts didn’t implode! It didn’t explode either. It just sat there. Who knew? Who could have guessed? Way back in 2003 that state’s Supreme Court ruled that gays had equal marriage rights. According to Christian and Muslim fundamentalists here’s what should have happened after that ruling:
Newly formed volcanoes should have erupted! As their volcanic cones collapsed and calderas formed, the Atlantic Ocean should have rushed in and claimed the entire state!! Massachusetts should have been just a sinful memory!!! Well, okay, since that didn’t happen, at least the following should have happened: heterosexual marriages should have begun to dissolve at a rate never before seen in that state or any other! Children should have run around in circles crying, “Who’s my Daddy?” or “Why are there two?” “Help!” Well, none of that happened either. So the ominous question looms: Why not?
On
May 15, 2008, the California Supreme Court ruled that the state’s ban on gay
marriage violated constitutional rights and all hell broke loose. Their decision
though is so chock-full of common sense that it’s surprising it didn’t
happen sooner. (After all, they are just a bunch of lawyers.) But
words like this—“…that an
individual’s sexual orientation—like a person’s race or gender—does not
constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights”
make you proud somehow. I mean, after you think Duh! you feel proud. You feel
less proud, though, as you read through this insightful, eye-opening ruling. The
Court makes references to California’s long-held ban on interracial
marriage. That’s an Ouch! Do you know how long it took California to undo the
ban on that? Time’s up. It took until 1948. I’ll repeat that because it
shocked me too. 1948. So from 1850 until 1948, a total of 98 years, blacks and
whites could not marry in California. Nor could Asians and blacks or…..well,
the list is long and complicated.
That
got me thinking. How could they prevent all such marriages anyway? How could you
tell if someone had some black blood in those veins? What if
someone was a “high yellow” as they used to call it? What if someone was
“passing” as they used to call it? If I recall there used to be a fingertip
test for ferreting out those individuals. All you had to do was press tightly on
a person’s fingertip, hold for a couple seconds, then see how long it took for
the color to come back. Then if…
Okay.
Even to make a point I can’t go on with this. It is disgusting. By
today’s standards it is disgusting. But how did our grandparents feel
about it? They just lived with it. It was the norm. And so it will be someday
with our own grandchildren. They will fail to see what all the fuss was about.
Gay marriage will be as normal as interracial marriage. I hope that day dawns
soon.
In the meantime…gay marriage? In California? Help! The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Oops. That’s Chicken Little. Wrong story. Now back to mine. However, I am not in any way exaggerating the hysteria surrounding gay marriage. To hear televangelists rant about gay marriage you’d think it was a fate worse than death. Homophobia is bad enough. But this is homophobia combined with paranoia and hatred. It does require some explanation. Perhaps the ingenious Stephen Colbert has the answer.
Colbert, the master of tongue-in-cheek, managed to assert to a guest on his show that he, Stephen, had been “forcefully gay married.” Yes, explained Stephen with a straight face, one night while he was sleeping some gays broke into his house and forcefully gay married him. As ridiculous as that sounds, it is nevertheless the sort of reasoning that must be used to explain the frenzied opposition to gay marriage. The asinine “Defense of Marriage Act” (DOMA) which was signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 (thanks, Bill, you pandering ass) never spells out what marriage needs defending against. In order to use the verb “defend” you are forced to use the preposition “against” or “from” or whatever. The verb will not stand alone if you already have used a noun (marriage) as being the object of the verb (defend). Why all this fuss about grammar? Because the Defense of Marriage Act sucks! It explains nothing.
My husband Pat and I have been married for more than half of our adult lives and we live in California. But we are not huddled in a frightened corner waiting for our marriage to dissolve because gays might marry! In fact we can’t figure out how it would affect us in any way at all. Why does our marriage need defending? Is it threatened by something? If so, what? How is any marriage threatened by other marriages? I do so wish someone would answer that. Alas, no one can. Because it makes no frigging sense! No act or law is defending anything in this discussion.
Defining? Yes. But when you use that word you have crossed a murky constitutional line infringing on civil rights, and the lawyers who wrote the narrow-minded Act knew this well. They knew they’d have to go on to say that only people who could produce children could get married. That would then exclude anyone who was infertile for any reason, including menopause….yes, that would have been sticky. Better to insist that somehow marriages were threatened by, um, other marriages.
Ellen DeGeneres may have said it best when she cornered and thoroughly demolished John McCain on her TV show. She made his condescending good wishes sound like the condescending battle cry of racial bigots: Separate but equal! Which of course is bullshit, for any group of people living in the USA. And McCain’s insistence on the “sanctity of marriage” rings hollow when you consider that he has been married twice because of divorce, not death. So which of his marriages needed defending from gays? And which was “sanctified” and which was not? The hypocrisy makes your head spin, doesn’t it?
Perhaps though Rachel Maddow said it best on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown. In talking about the ruling on California’s ban on gay marriage, she said they’re making it sound like gays can finally drive cars or own pets, just like real people. Touché!
Now facing the electorate is the inevitable question: Will California implode? Will newly formed volcanoes….
© 2008 Judith Hayes
Back
to
Beyond Belief
Back
to Main Page
