My 2015 volume
of my cultural memoirs is about issues if identity, and therefore has major sections on racial, gay-lesbian,
transgender, and religious hostility from the before the first World War to the
present day. These are fraught issues, each with their very dark histories. But
I thought I would, with the news Friday about gay and lesbian marriage, post
that section of my Introduction to My Year 2015.
In films such as Love Is Strange it was apparent that the scars of past sexual
prejudice were not yet healed. And The Imitation Game, the latter of which,
in turn, challenged me to read Andrew Hodges’ brilliant study of Allan Turing, The Enigma, brought up, once more, the
horrible effects of the varying societal restrictions concerning sexual
behavior.
The Turing works coincided with a whole slew
of new titles in 2014-15 which called up significant issues in the early 20th
century that led up to World War II, which simultaneously had brought into being
all sorts of evils concerning narrow individual and cultural identities and the
inability to accept others outside narrow boundaries of religion, race, sex, and
cultural concepts.
Yet, Friday, June 26, 2015 also brought
about a major cultural change when the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional
to deny gays and lesbians the right to be married, a decision that would
completely transform one aspect of identity forever in the US. While we
celebrated, however, a latent hate for homosexuals and lesbians and a denial of
what Justice Kennedy, in the ruling decision, described as “dignity,” was
perpetuated even in the dissenting jurists’ statements, wherein Justice John G.
Roberts Jr. stated that while gays and lesbians might celebrate the day, they
should not celebrate the constitution, suggesting that he strongly felt that
gay marriage was not a constitutional issue. The nearly always mean-spirited
Antonin Scalia also argued that the right to marry was against the founder’s
notions in writing the Constitution and the principles on which the country was
founded and spent a great deal of time mocking Kennedy’s language and reasoning;
while the most dense-minded of the jurists, Clarence Thomas saw the decision as
a defeat for democracy, and turned even the word “dignity,” which Kennedy
argued was implied in the 14th Amendment, on its head, arguing that
the government cannot give this quality to a people, nor take it away:
The corollary of that principle is
that human dignity cannot be
taken away by the government.
Slaves did not lose their dignity
(any more than they lost their
humanity) because the government
allowed them to be enslaved. Those
held in internment camps
did not lose their dignity because
the government confined
them. And those denied governmental
benefits certainly do
not lose their dignity because the
government denies
them those benefits. The government
cannot bestow dignity,
and it cannot take it away.
Was
he actually suggesting that these detestable government actions had had no
effect upon those who suffered these decisions? For, in fact, I would argue
that institutions and the government that supported them, allowing slavery,
internment camps, and the denial of governmental benefits did precisely take away
the dignity of these individuals who not only suffered their effects, but by
permitting them to be perceived as slaves or prisoners of lesser value instead
of equal and beloved beings in the larger society, denied their humanity and
even threatened their lives.
In the end, however, it is not “dignity”
that I sought in the Court’s decision but the assertion of what I fell is a
right, a fundamental right allowed me already by the Constitution, while
continually denied by a few bigots who are determined not to permit the change
that most Americans have already come to accept. Living in California, Howard
and I have been given a permission that some of my peers are denied, simply
because of the place where they reside. Yes, we might wait for several more
decades for the attitudes to further change and for lower courts to chip away
at the determined homophobes and religious fundamentalists, but the law can
also help us to perceive where we have been mistaken. Blacks might still be
waiting today to attend white schools and interracial couples might yet be
waiting to marry, had it not been for the recognition that to deny these rights
was no longer just.
Each of the four dissenting justices
argued as if law was something written into stone, and could only be changed by
the electorate and congress; but in fact, law is a living organism that must be
interpreted, reinterpreted, and, on occasion, pushed forward not as a political
agenda but as a vision whose time has come. The Constitution is not a set of
frozen words put upon parchment by a group of founders into whose minds we must
crawl each time to interpret what they meant, but a breathing collection of
language whose significance must be expanded to include the present and the
future, not simply the past.
If democracy and our Constitution do not
permit gay marriage, I argue, I don’t want to live in the nation imagined by
the conservative justices. And now, fortunately, I do not have to—at least with
regard to this issue.
Anyone like me, who has lived through so
many decades of some his countrymen’s hate for simply being who he or she was,
knows, moreover, that there still will be many attempts by states and
communities to defeat, ignore, and water down the new decision. Surely we can
expect strong negative reactions, some already promised by Republican
presidential candidates, none of whom could still allow for the Supreme Court
decision. Governor Scott Walker promised to push for a constitutional amendment
which would actively take away those new-found rights; others, such as Ted Cruz
and Mike Huckabee vowed to continue to fight the decision. Louisiana governor
and GOP candidate, Bobby Jindal went so far as to suggest that we “get rid of
the Supreme Court.” Many state legislatures will attempt to override such
marriages with bogus state-rights bills; and we can expect hundreds of attempts
to provide religious exceptions for all sorts of refusals to participate in or
even permit gay and lesbian marriage, particularly in outlying rural areas. Only
two days later, gays who applied for marriage licenses were turned down in Mississippi,
Louisiana, and Texas.
As I predicted in my essay, “Second Hand
Rose” in My Year 2013, “I truly
believe that inevitably the whole US will have to come to the conclusion—as they have had to concerning so many
other issues—that marriage quality for lesbian and gay couples is the only
choice.” But the question I then posed still remains: “But why are those so
intent on delaying and ending that choice still so adamant?” Surely if the
Republican candidates cannot rid themselves of their dinosaur notions, they
will find it hard to survive among the broader and younger American electorate.
The
President’s White House portico speech was slow and polite without any true
passion, presenting us with a figure who was caring perhaps, excited for the
news, but not totally involved with the polite and totally appropriate remarks
he was making. One got the sense that he was incredibly exhausted.
The remarkable fact that a few hours later
President Obama delivered a eulogy at the funeral for the black pastor at the
Emanuel AME church and South Carolina senator, Clementa Pickney that embraced
the rhetoric of Southern church going blacks and commitments to a new racial
future, was astounding and thoroughly exciting, particularly when the formerly
politically nuanced President began to speak with the repeated antiphonal
responses of black church preachers, letting loose in a way that most Americans
and I certainly have never heard him speak, relying on his back and forth vocal
encounters with his audience to speak about issues such as the Confederate flag
and the numerous other changes necessary for true black equality and racial
redemption.
And then, suddenly, when you might have
expected it, he began to sing the old Southern hymn Amazing Grace in a voice a bit frail, that became stronger with
each bar as he sang it, lilting into true vocal surety before, finally, the
other ministers, the parishioners, and the choral singers of the church joined
him, at the very moment of which, he shouted out the names of the “amazing”
family members who had determinedly spoken out with “graceful” love against the
violent actions of if murderer, Roof. No American president had ever done this
before, and one might imagine that it would be hard for any future president to
repeat it. This was perhaps one of the most significant moments, particularly
within the context of the other news of the day, in American history, an event
that would certainly define Obama’s presidency. I cried with complete
abandonment; and it was clear, when the reporter Don Lemmon and others on CNN
reappeared on the screen to comment on events, they too had been utterly moved
by the speech. Something significant had happened, and when I quickly noted by
feelings on Facebook, hundreds of my “friends” quickly confirmed my own
emotions. In a single day, Obama had been able to connect the issues of
identity of the LBGT (Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender) community with
the country’s continued problems with racial violence.. And that night the
White House was lit up with the colors of the LBGT coalition. For a moment the
country seemed blessed.
