As I mentioned in my caucus post, someone in my precinct brought up the fact that John Kerry has publicly opposed gay marriage itself, while supporting civil unions with all the legal bells and whistles. Here's a statement saying exactly that on Kerry's campaign site. Although this is hardly unique to Kerry. At least according to The Advocate, all of the non-flake candidates have stopped short of supporting anything with the name 'marriage' for same-sex couples, though they all seem to back civil unions with more or less all the same legal benefits. (Although Edwards's support seems to be weakest and most limited; here's some information.)
Now, this is, compared to what we have now, still really pro-gay, and so it feels almost boorish and ungrateful of me to complain about this stance--yet, upon reflection, I feel complaint is still warranted.
I'm sure a certain amount of political calculation goes into this; candidates feel civil unions would be easier to sell to a public that includes lots of pro-wrestling fans and drooling vegetables. And they are probably right in this. To a degree. A small degree. But I don't think they're buying themselves enough of a political advantage to balance out the passive discrimination they're still pushing. Read this snippet from TAPPED. The homophobes will vote against a candidate who supports civil unions with as much venom as they'll vote against a candidate who supports gay marriage. According to this, Howard Dean at times had to wear a bulletproof vest during his 2000 gubernatorial campaign, after the civil unions issue came up. And that wasn't in Mississippi. In my opinion, no matter how many times John Kerry says he's against gay marriage, his support for gay rights and civil unions will hurt him just as much. How will conservatives spin it? They'll claim Kerry's dishonest, trying to sugar-coat his real Gay Agenda so he can force-feed it to an unsuspecting, God-fearing American public. They'll paint him as a puppet of the Pink Mafia. Or something bizarrely stupid like that. No change in terminology will stop that.*
And anything short of full equality of marriage rights, in name as well as in legal fact, is at least passively discriminatory, and will only promote the idea that gays and lesbians can be ghettoised and walled off in their own little social sectors safely isolated from 'decent folk' like Jerry Falwell. Civil unions without marriage will only reinforce the idea of homosexuals as part of the Other, as a strange, aberrant strain separate from the rest of humanity. We are not separate. And until that is acknowledged, we will not be equal.
*Addendum: The New York Times has an article up about anti-gay-marriage agitators. I quote:
"I don't care if you call it civil unions," Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said last week. "I don't care if you call it domestic partnership, I don't care if you call it cantaloupe soup, if you are legally spouses at the end of the day, I am not willing to do that."
You cannot buy these people off with tepid language: they believe God Almighty has given them special dispensation to be bigoted assholes, praise the Lord. So the Democrats might as well take the bull by the horns already and treat this like the human rights issue that it is, instead of trying to soft-shoe around it.
Posted by aloysius at February 07, 2004 02:15 PM | TrackBack |