[Vision2020] Will Gays Be Punished for Success?

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

------------------------------
March 30, 2013
Will Gays Be Punished for Success? By MAUREEN
DOWD<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html>

WASHINGTON

GAYS might not win because they’ve already won?

That was the moronic oxymoron at the heart of the Supreme Court debate on
same-sex marriage.

As Washington shivered in a chilly spring, there was no music of history at
America’s highest court. The justices offered no pearls on liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. Justice Antonin Scalia didn’t even know how many
states allowed gay marriage. Clarence Thomas looked distracted, whispering
to clerks and tilting horizontally in his chair.

Justice Anthony Kennedy had a single compassionate moment, mentioning the
children whose gay parents were stuck in marital limbo. But for the most
part, the human factor, how demeaning it feels to be shunted to a lower
plane than your fellow citizens, was ignored.

Kennedy offered no lovely odes to fairness as he did in Lawrence v. Texas
in 2003, striking down a sodomy law, when people in the courtroom actually
wept at his majority opinion, which stated that “the heart of liberty is
the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the
universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Brushing back originalists and troglodytes then, Kennedy said that “times
can blind us to certain truths, and later generations can see that laws
once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress.”

On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts played Karl Rove, musing not about
moral imperatives but political momentum.

“You don’t doubt that the lobby supporting the enactment of same-sex
marriage laws in different states is politically powerful, do you?” he
asked Roberta Kaplan, the New York lawyer representing Edie Windsor, the
captivating 83-year-old who argued that she would not have been socked with
a whopping estate tax bill if her spouse had been named Theo instead of
Thea.

Roberts pressed the point, noting, “As far as I can tell, political figures
are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case.”

Certainly, the cascading headlines were buoying. “Gay Marriage Already
Won,” Time proclaimed. “Why the Gay-Marriage Fight Is Over,” The New Yorker
deemed. It was hard to find vocal opponents in the vibrant demonstration
outside the Supreme Court, and Rush Limbaugh conceded, “This issue is
lost.” There was even a Chick-fil-A franchise in Southern California giving
free meals to gay-marriage supporters.

But Justice Roberts’s suggestion that gays are banishing a long, egregious
history of blatant, disgusting, government-sponsored discrimination on
their own is absurd. You could almost hear him thinking, “They’ve got
‘Glee,’ they’ve got Ellen, they’ve got Tammy Baldwin — what are they
whining about?”

Can you imagine Chief Justice Earl Warren, a Republican, making a similar
point about blacks during the 1967 Loving v. Virginia arguments? In that
case, the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been passed and the 1967 movie “Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner?” was a harbinger of a sea change on mixed-race
marriages. The court noted in its opinion that the political process had
achieved significant progress around the country, with 14 states in 15
years repealing laws outlawing interracial marriages.

Yet the justices struck down the law anyway because, as they said, “the
freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal
rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” (Paving
the way for Clarence and Ginni Thomas to live happily ever after in
Virginia.)

When the suit against Proposition 8, the initiative that banned gay
marriage in California, was filed in 2009, opponents argued that it was too
soon and that a court decision favoring gay rights could cause a backlash.
Now opponents say things are going so well for gays that they don’t need
help from the Supreme Court. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. (Or
in this case, damned if you say “I do.”)

Gays may be winning on atmospherics, but there’s only so much more progress
they can make politically.

Women are protected from discrimination under the law even though they make
up 51 percent of the population and are as responsible as anybody for
putting Barack Obama in the Oval Office twice.

But Congress has passed no federal protections for gays on employment,
housing and education. In 29 states, it is perfectly legal to fire someone
because of his or her sexual orientation. The F.B.I. says the only uptick
in hate crimes involves attacks on gays.

Thirty-one states have enacted Constitutional amendments banning same-sex
marriage. Beyond the nine states where they can marry, plus D.C., gays may
pick up Illinois and Delaware, but then there’s a hard stop. Those struck
by Cupid in places like Alabama, Arkansas and Utah will long be left either
moving or saying, “I’m deliriously, madly in love with you, but let’s leave
it to the states, honey.”

Even with Hispanics riding high in the public arena, the “wetback” crack by
the Republican Congressman Don Young of Alaska shows bigotry is always
lurking.

What the political world giveth, it can taketh away. The Supreme Court
should know that civil rights are not supposed to be determined on the
whims of the people.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20130331/dd3500d8/attachment.html>