Let's have a real gay marriage debate

The United States Senate considers itself the world's most important deliberative body, but you wouldn't know it from the debate this week on a constitutional amendment banning gays from marrying.

President Bush was right about one thing. The issue is one of "great significance," as he acknowledged Monday, about which "opinions are strong and emotions run deep."

Whether because of those emotions or the depressing state of political discourse generally these days, the real issues got precious little attention in two days of Senate debate and even less from mainstream media coverage.

Instead, encouraged by Democrats and their gay activist allies, the focus was predictably on the horserace, and whether the amendment was a really diversionary tactic designed to shore up the conservative base in time for the fall elections.

Undoubtedly true, but beside the point. The Senate was debating our future and that of our relationships and families, and yet we were almost entirely missing from the discussion.

http://www.washblade.com/blog/index.cfm?type=blog&start=6/8/06&end=6/10/06#7356

because there is no real gay marriage issue. The issue has little to nothing to do with gays. It has everything to do with the establishment of theocracy and the overthrowing of the constitution.

The constitution has always been a tool used to protect the rights of citizens, and the definition of citizens has constantly grown over the nation's history. An amendment to ban gay marriage targets a specific class of citizen for discrimination, based on the morality of a certain brand of religion.

Those who say the gay marriage gambit is but a diversionary tactic, or a 'wedge issue', have it all wrong. It is a deliberate attack on our democracy by anti-democratic forces. Gays are, as were the Jews in Nazi Germany, simply a means to an end.

:hi: I was wondering where the gay couples were,in this debate to change the Constitution. I think everyone should have a voice,especially when it's a subject that has such an impact on your own freedom and pursuit of happiness. Gay people matter just as much as anyone else! IMO,I think that everyone that voted,should have been sworn in and asked if they ever had a Homosexual relationship or sex before marriage or if they committed Adultery, at any time in their life.Most are a bunch of Homophobic Hypocrites. **** Self righteous Evangelical Christians have always thought they had a monopoly on morality; :eyes: "'Why the Ugly Rhetoric Against Gay Marriage Is Familiar to this Historian of Miscegenation'

"We are in the midst of an attempt to ground a category of discrimination in the fundamental social bedrock of marriage law. I would argue that it is virtually impossible to understand the current debate over same-sex marriage without first understanding the history of American miscegenation laws and the long legal fight against them, if only because both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage come to this debate, knowing or unknowingly, wielding rhetorical tools forged during the history of miscegenation law. The arguments white supremacists used to justify for miscegenation laws--that interracial marriages were contrary to God's will or somehow unnatural--are echoed today by the most conservative opponents of same-sex marriage. And supporters of same-sex marriage base their cases on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, echoing the position the U.S. Supreme Court took when it declared miscegenation laws unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia." :eyes:http://hnn.us/articles/4708.html
"Gay Marriage'

"Historians tend to be uncomfortable making direct comparisons between the present and the past, and I'm no exception to that rule. It is important to remember that there are real differences in the case of gay marriage and so- called mixed marriages. The situation of a lesbian or gay couple in 2004 is not the same as that of an interracial couple in the 1930s, when miscegenation laws carried criminal penalties, when whites were nearly unanimous in their condemnation of interracial marriage, and when the specter of lynching hovered over discussions of interracial sex. The federal government is a much bigger player in the fight over same-sex marriage than it ever was in the case of miscegenation law; in the case of interracial marriage, there was no federal equivalent to the Defense of Marriage Act.

Supporters of same-sex marriage face formidable obstacles, but in large part because of the successes of twentieth century opponents of miscegenation law, they have also found support that interracial couples in the 1930s would have envied--from legal experts on the constitution, from county clerks in Oregon who recently decided that rather than discriminate on the basis of sex, they would refuse to issue any marriage licenses at all (to opposite-sex or same-sex couples), and even from the justices of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, who cited the Loving case repeatedly in their Goodridge decision. If the campaign for same-sex marriage succeeds (and I hope, very much, that it does), it will be not only because of the efforts of lesbian and gay activists but because of the civil rights advocates (black, white, Asian American and American Indian) who spent so much of the twentieth century working to put an end to American's three-century tradition of miscegenation laws." :woohoo: By 'Peggy Pascoe
Ms. Pascoe is Associate Professor and Beekman Chair of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon. She is completing a book on the significance of miscegenation law in United States history.'


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