Rhetoric Race and Religion
On Tuesday the Supreme Court overturned a central part of the Voting Rights Act, one of the main accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement for African Americans. Southern states, consistent with the racist legacy of slavery that has shaped their politics for the past 150 years at least, are now rushing to put in place new rules to make it more difficult for African Americans and Latinos to vote.
Then on Wednesday the Supreme Court declared the “Defense of Marriage Act” unconstitutional, thereby opening the door to gay marriage and sustaining a lower court decision that had overturned the California state proposition that had tried to prevent those marriages.
Why is it “no to Blacks and Yes to gays?”
Don’t expect a constitutional argument here. As the Supreme Court minority on Voting Rights made clear, the argument for dismantling the victories of the Civil Rights era are pathetically inadequate. And, one might add, hypocritical given that those who overturned that Congressional Act often proclaim their opposition to an “activist judiciary” that interferes with legislative decisions.
The answer is purely political.
For the past twenty years with deep commitment, and for ten years with growing intensity, the gay and lesbian communities have relentlessly pushed forward their convincing arguments that it is a morally indefensible double standard to allow heterosexuals to marry and to deny that same legal right to homosexuals. That such a double standard has been part of the legacy of the human race for thousands of years made no difference. The key point is that largely thanks to the successes of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, our society has embraced the notion of equal rights with self-congratulatory enthusiasm, and in this light the unequal treatment of gays and lesbians could be seen as inconsistent and hurtful.
Read the rest here
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In