Viewpoint: Civil
Rights and Gay Rights
What's at stake for
blacks in the
Massachusetts gay
marriage debate
By JENINNE LEE-ST.
JOHN, TIME On Line Edition, October 26, 2005
My mother's father didn't want to
attend her wedding. To a Chinese immigrant who came to New York as a boy,
who had lived and toiled in the back of a laundromat and worked his way up to
become a successful insurance business owner and community leader, the prospect
of his oldest child marrying a black American man was not just shameful, it was
a step backward.
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Common Ground: The author |
As the date approached and the
tension increased, my parents had no idea of how many guests to plan for.
My father's parents welcomed the marriage, so they were in, but because my
grandfather was head of his extended family, no one could go if he didn't.
Finally, luckily, his own mother, my great-grandmother, sat him down and told
him she would obey his wishes but that he was being pigheaded and should support
his daughter. Which, finally, he did and everyone reconciled.
My great-grandmother might also have mentioned that her son's reflexive
prejudice was a bit ironic given the innumerable racial slights and indignities
he had suffered in America, including in the Army, at the hands of whites.
But then, it's hardly an unusual pattern. Just look at the black religious
leaders — like Rev. Bernice King, a daughter of Martin Luther King Jr.;
evangelical juggernaut Bishop T. D. Jakes; and groups like the Memphis-based
Coalition of African American Pastors — who've joined ranks with the
conservative Right in opposing gay marriage. They say gay rights are not
the same as civil rights. They accuse gays and lesbians of "hijacking" the
civil rights movement for their homosexual agenda. They say it's unholy
and unnatural. But it's for perhaps that last argument alone that, as the
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court mulls a challenge to an old state law now
being used to prohibit out-of-state homosexual couples from wedding there, black
Americans should sympathize with gays and lesbians who want to marry.
Of course there are important differences. "The comparison with slavery is
a stretch," Jesse Jackson asserted in a speech at Harvard last year, "in that
some slave masters were gay, in that gays were never called three-fifths human
in the Constitution and in that they did not require the Voting Rights Act to
have the right to vote." All of which is true. Race is most often,
rightly or not, signified physically. While gays have been, and still are
in many instances, forced to play straight, they at least had a refuge. It
was historically difficult, usually impossible, and often illegal, for a black
person to pass as white (even if 15/16ths of his blood was). They had
nowhere to hide.
So yes, in the game of Who's Been More Systematically Oppressed?, black people
win hands down. But that doesn't discount the hardships of other groups.
(Remember the federal Defense of Marriage Act?) And it doesn't mean
everyone isn't entitled to equal rights. Through the years, America has
dished out enough oppression to go around. Much of it has been strikingly
similar. The anti-miscegenation laws that were enacted in much of the
South were rooted in interpretations of the Bible. Interracial intimacy
was seen as unnatural. Blacks were put forth as filthy sub-humans who
wanted to muddy white bloodlines and thus destroy the goodness of the white
race. Race mixing was akin to bestiality. Sound familiar?
"Defenders" of marriage, from Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum to Justice Antonin
Scalia to Pope Benedict, have tossed out arguments just like these in their
quest to keep same-sex couples from the altar.
And, when his state's high court cleared the way for gay marriage, Gov. Mitt
Romney invoked a law from 1913 prohibiting Massachusetts marriage licenses from
being given to nonresident couples whose union would be "void" in their home
state. Anti-integrationists were plain wrong then; black people had no
master plan to destroy the institution of the white family. Who's to say
the forces against gay marriage won't be proven Chicken Littles as well?
But let's set aside the moral question of gayness. Conservative blacks
should denounce the Massachusetts law in question not because they've suddenly
decided to embrace something they find wrong but because the law is wrong.
It's ostensibly a Federalist argument that is in fact homophobic — and was
racist — in intent. And it offends me to the core that lawmakers would
deny equal rights to one minority group using a statute created to target
others, a statute that could have barred, even invalidated, my existence and
might have prevented me from marrying my (white) boyfriend from Massachusetts in
Massachusetts. Remember that it took until 1967 for the U.S. Supreme Court
to declare unconstitutional the anti-miscegenation laws that remained on the
books in 16 states — and that Alabama still didn't repeal its law until five
years ago.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is expected to decide within four
months whether to grant marriage licenses to out-of-state gay and lesbian
couples, to grant them the same rights enjoyed by in-state homosexual couples
since 2003. I'm hoping the Court rules in favor of the eight same-sex
couples, from the other five New England states plus New York, that want to
certify their commitment to each other. Then the Court would be sticking
to the principle that guided its original decision that cleared the way for gay
marriage in the first place, the same tenet that led the U.S. Supreme Court to
unanimously decriminalize interracial unions forty years ago: the notion
that marriage is "one of the basic civil rights." A law that blatantly
denies that right and one that essentially affirms such laws elsewhere, are
equally unjust.
Black Americans don't need to approve of or understand homosexuality to
recognize that. And they owe it to successes of the civil rights movement,
to their own triumph over inhumane treatment and accusations of an impure
agenda, to try. My mother's father was a religious man too, but I believe
he would have.
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