If we can make it there …

Last updated on: June 25, 2011 at 10:04 pm by Fred Clark

If we can make it there … 2011-06-25T22:04:02-04:00 Fred Clark

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This is a joyful Saturday night in New York after yesterday’s vote to legalize marriage equality for same-sex couples in the Empire State.

My favorite reaction to that good news was Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s two-word summary/response: “Love wins.”

And I commend Republican state Sen. Mark Grisanti for his very honest, and very American, explanation for his vote in support of New York’s marriage equality law:

Republican Sen. Mark Grisanti, who was previously undecided, announced he would vote for the bill: “I cannot legally come up with an argument against same sex marriage.”

“I cannot deny a human being … the same rights that I had with my wife,” said Grisanti.

That’s the heart of the matter. Is there a legal basis, a constitutional basis, for denying some human beings the same rights enjoyed by other human beings? Grisanti doesn’t see how there could be. I don’t either. And no one has yet been able to offer any such argument to a court of law.

The disturbing thing is that many others who likewise have no legal or constitutional argument nevertheless vote — and campaign and speechify — to continue denying some citizens the rights other citizens enjoy.

The political fundraising organizations of the religious right extract lots of money from gullible conservative donors by claiming that if the legal right to marry is no longer denied to same-sex couples, then somehow their churches will be forced to perform gay weddings. That makes about as much sense as saying that if Catholics are allowed to marry, then Protestants will be forced to perform Catholic weddings (and Jewish weddings, and Hindu weddings, etc.). They present this absurdity as if they were making a religious argument, but that’s not what it really is. It’s not an argument based on religion, it’s an argument based on fear — based on baseless, irrational fear at that.

I understand that many Americans belong to religious traditions that believe homosexuality is a sin. That means they and their co-religionists have a religious imperative not to marry someone of their own gender. That does not mean that they have a religious imperative to prevent anyone else or everyone else from enjoying full civil rights. And it does not mean that they have a religious imperative — or any legitimate legal right or legitimate moral claim — to coerce the rest of the country into abiding by the tenets of their sect.

Forcing the rest of the world to abide by the tenets of your particular sect is deeply immoral and corrosive, regardless of whether or not your particular sect considers it a sin. (Mine does, but I’m not arguing that you must respect religious freedom because it’s the Baptist thing to do, I’m arguing that you must respect religious freedom because it is — in nonsectarian terms, for nonsectarian reasons — the just and moral thing to do. It’s also the only constitutional and the only legal option here in America.)

David Remnick of The New Yorker hears some ignoble historical echoes in the willingness of so many politicians to deny some citizens rights despite the utter lack of any legal argument:

One of the most striking aspects of the recent Republican Party presidential debate was the way the candidates, each in his own way, tried to out-do each other in their disdain for gay marriage and their willingness—nay, their ardent vows!—to do everything possible to make sure that homosexual couples never gain the right to matrimony. One day soon, someone will play back that debate as an exercise in historical shame, much as we now watch documentary clips of serene racial bigots denouncing the efforts of the black freedom movement in days of yore.

Many of those documentary clips from days of yore are of religious leaders, and everything Remnick says there about politicians is equally true of those religious leaders today doing their best impression of their forebears.

New York joins Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa and the District of Columbia in legally recognizing same-sex marriage. The addition of New York to that list more than doubles the number of Americans now living in states with marriage equality. And once California’s case works its way through the courts, with the inevitable result — due to the aforementioned utter lack of any legal argument against marriage equality there — that number will double again, bringing nearly a quarter of the country’s population into full legal marriage equality.

Vermont’s statute is more than a decade old. So we’ve already had 10 years to watch and see if any of the dire consequences opponents of marriage equality predicted would come to pass. They haven’t. At all. Not in Vermont, or New Hampshire, or Connecticut, or Iowa or Massachusetts. And they won’t come to pass in New York either.

With each day that passes, with each state that joins this list, those dire predictions will be harder for even the most fearful to believe. Eventually the utter lack of any legal argument will be matched by the utter lack of any effectively demagogic argument based on fear.

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