Here We Go Again
By Geov Parrish
Columnist, North Seattle Herald Outlook
While a few court challenges linger, it now appears all but certain that Referendum 71 – fundamentalist Christian religious leaders’ attempt to overturn our state legislature’s “all but in name” bill giving legal rights equivalent to marriage to unmarried straight or gay couples – will be on the ballot this November. And my first, overwhelming reaction is: what a complete and utter waste of time and resources.
Not that this issue isn’t critically important. It is. Encoding equal rights for all into our state’s laws is always critically important. But we know, over the next generation, how this is going to turn out. One day, we’re going to look back and marvel at the time when discrimination against same-sex couples was legal, just as, today, Jim Crow or women’s inability to vote seems like a mystifying historical oddity. Campaigns like R.71 will be seen for exactly what they are: the last major spasms of a dying bigotry.
And I am so tired of having to respond every time one of these spasms rears its ugly, and in this case homophobic, head. There are so many better things we could be doing with the money that will go into this campaign. Feed the hungry. House the homeless! Hey! I know! Let’s give everyone access to adequate health care!
You get the idea.
In particular, I’m getting really tired of having to combat religious zealots whose particular version of the imaginary voices in their heads tells them not only how they should live, but how we should live, and how society should grant or deny us our basic rights as a result.
Funny thing how, when the most reactionary tendencies in society have no rational reasons left for their hatred, they always tend to fall back on religious beliefs. In their respective days, slavery, Jim Crow, denying women the vote and countless other manifestations of bigotry were vigorously defended long past their sell-by date by those twin pillars of institutionalized oppression, “We’ve always done it this way” and “It’s in the Bible!”
But these battles, sadly, are totally necessary. Changed laws are usually the last major step in granting long-overdue rights. One day, federal courts will throw out the federal and state DOMAs as embarrassing vestiges of bigotry analogous to our state’s onetime laws forbidding Asians from owning land.
But we’re not there yet – and so this campaign, irritating and historically superfluous as it is, remains critical.
And there’s another reason why even straight-laced heterosexuals should be passionate about defending our state against the backers of R.71. At its heart it’s more a conservative than a liberal argument: what we do in our homes, or our bedrooms, is none of the government’s business. And it’s certainly not the business of the sort of self-appointed moral guardians who, in the name of their particular religion, are pushing R.71.
It’s utterly preposterous that we’re subjecting anyone’s civil rights to a popular vote. And, using Pastor Niemoller’s famous formulation, “First they came for the gays, and I did not speak out, because I was not a gay….” It’s doubly disturbing that Referendum 71 is specifically about one faction of a religion – remember that very many Christians have been strong supporters of gay civil rights, too – trying to impose its beliefs on everybody else.
The default position of a legal code in a society with many conflicting moral and ethical mores is to honor the rights of all, so long as those rights don’t impinge on the equally important rights of others. My right to bond with whichever consenting adult I please trumps your less important right to be disgusted with my choice.
The legal contract of marriage is particularly tricky because it has long been conflated with the religious ceremony of marriage. They are two different things. I can get married (and have, twice) without the benefit of a church, or pastor; but the state recognizes as legally binding the same ceremony whether it’s done in a church or courthouse. Nobody is forcing a particular church to marry gay couples if they don’t want to – but they should not have the right to prevent the state, or another church, from conducting such marriages. And they certainly shouldn’t have the right to prevent the state from recognizing gay marriages, or from conferring on gay couples (or any other couples not legally married) the same contractual rights and responsibilities married couples enjoy. The latter question is what R.71 specifically addresses.
But Referendum 71 is also the flashpoint of a larger issue, and not just about gay rights. One of the tenets of modern fundamentalism (sic) is that there’s no such thing in our Constitution as the separation of church and state, that it’s a dangerous myth sent by Satan, and that the church – their church – can and should run our country as a theocracy.
No. Thanks. If they don’t want to sleep with someone of their own gender, then they shouldn’t do it. But keep their hands, and their archaic laws, off our bodies. And keep their perverted notions of faith out of our lives.
Get busy today: stop the backers of Referendum 71. Because if they’re not stopped, I promise you, they will keep going.
