Feb. 24 Flashback: A loud silence

Last updated on: February 24, 2022 at 7:00 am by Fred Clark

Feb. 24 Flashback: A loud silence 2022-02-20T21:21:25-05:00 Fred Clark

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When this blog started, newspapers were still writing, “so-called Web logs, or ‘blogs’ …”

From February 24, 2011, “Cricket. Cricket. Tumbleweed“:

This is what we’ve come to expect from the incredibly shrinking opposition to marriage equality: 1) the assertion that there are “lots” of excellent, terribly important arguments in support of a legal ban against same-sex couples getting married, and 2) the failure to mention what all those “lots” of excellent, terribly important arguments might actually be.

Nowhere was this made clearer than in the legal battle over California’s Proposition 8. U.S. district court Judge Vaughn Walker overturned the state’s ban of same-sex marriage and in his decision on the case, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Walker noted the lack of arguments in support of the ban and its codification of inequality under the law. The judge didn’t criticize the substance of Prop 8 proponents’ arguments, he simply shook his head at the absence of them.

Attorney David Boies, who successfully argued against Prop 8 in the case, pointed out why this is so:

It’s easy to sit around and debate and throw around opinions — appeal to people’s fear and prejudice, cite studies that either don’t exist or don’t say what you say they do. In a court of law you’ve got to come in and you’ve got to support those opinions. You’ve got to stand up under oath and cross-examination. And what we saw at trial is that it’s very easy for the people who want to deprive gay and lesbian citizens the right to vote, to make all sorts of statements in campaign literature or in debates where they can’t be cross-examined.

But when they come into court and they have to support those opinions and they have to defend those opinions under oath and cross-examination, those opinions just melt away. And that’s what happened here. There simply wasn’t any evidence. There weren’t any of those studies. There weren’t any empirical studies. That’s just made up. That’s junk science.

That junk science and gaping lack of evidence is what Whelan refers to as “lots of reasonable arguments.” By “reasonable” there, he means arguments that can be made to sound reasonable when one is a guest on a cable news shoutfest — a place where imaginary “studies” can be cited and actual studies can be distorted with impunity, knowing that the TV host will never challenge you on it and the TV audience won’t easily be able to double-check your claims. But as Boies noted, those insupportable claims don’t cut it in court, where one has to testify under oath. And when called on to testify under oath in court, the proponents of inequality under the law who seemed so animated on cable TV suddenly grew very, very quiet.

JUDGE: Can you present any evidence that recognizing that same-sex couples have the same legal rights as other couples would harm the institution of marriage, or harm children, or harm the common good, or harm public health?

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE OPPONENT: [cricket. … cricket. … tumbleweed.]

That silence, I think, partly accounts for the generational chasm that seems to have opened in two of the vanguard groups opposed to equal legal rights for GLBT people: Republicans and evangelical Christians.

Read the whole post here.

It seems that as recently as 11 years ago I was writing “GLBT” rather than “LGBT.” Not sure when, why, or how that changed.

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