When our emotions do not matter
How does the legal commitment of any two people affect anyone else’s marriage?

We were at opposite ends of a telephone line, but we were looking at the same photo on the front page of the Sun Journal. It showed two elderly women being wed in San Francisco.

“So you have no problem with this?” the telephone caller asked.

I hesitated before answering, acknowledging the yawning chasm that would, I knew, in a moment divide us.

The issue – gay marriage – is that visceral. To the caller, the photo of the two smiling women gently embracing evoked real feelings of disgust.

I looked carefully at the photo again. Did I have those feelings? Could I summon those emotions? Could I emphasize with his revulsion?

In short, did I have a “problem” with the photograph of the two elderly women?

“No,” I told the caller. “I do not.”

“Well,” he said before hanging up, “that explains everything.”

Only later, however, did I realize that it explained nothing.

My emotional reaction shouldn’t matter, and neither should his. And, for that matter, neither should yours.

Many years ago my mother told me about social work she had done in a poor neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pa.

She had entered a large apartment building where she found white people and “Negroes” living under the same roof. After visiting that building, she said, she went home and took a shower.

That was her emotional reaction: shock and revulsion.

Fortunately, the civil rights movement came, our courts and Congress were forced to confront these issues, and so was my family.

Most of us eventually overcame our emotional reactions and popular sentiments and finally extended to blacks the same legal rights and protections enjoyed by whites.

It was the right thing to do. What once seemed frightening and unimaginable is now largely reality and we are, as a nation, far better off.

Eventually, my parents lived in a house with black neighbors on either side, people they loved and respected. My elderly father became “Uncle George” to their children, and they cried at his funeral and hugged my mother.

It had been a long and painful journey, but a journey worth making.

On Wednesday, first lady Laura Bush said she was “very, very shocked” by the idea of gay marriages. Her husband, the president, meanwhile, condemned the “activist judges” who are now upsetting the comfortable apple cart of male-female unions.

Strange how the very terms echo of earlier civil rights struggles.

The Maine House of Representatives, meanwhile, considered last week (and voted down) a constitutional ban on same-sex unions. Proponents, however, promised to return, despite the existence of a Maine law that also bars same-sex marriages.

The protection of minority rights, however, is not and cannot be a matter of preference, emotion or majority rule.

Marriage confers a host of social and legal advantages upon heterosexual couples. We cannot and should not prohibit a group of people from enjoying those same advantages simply because they do not share our sexual orientation.

Your church may forbid same-sex marriages, and that’s fine. But not everyone goes to your church. Is it fair for you to apply your church’s teachings to everyone in a pluralistic society?

Rights, of course, can be curtailed when they conflict or when they harm or keep others from exercising their rights. Indeed, as we all know, your right to free speech does not allow you to shout fire in a crowded theater.

But how does the legal commitment of any two people affect my marriage or yours? I cannot see how the commitment of two men or two women prevents me from enjoying my marriage or any of my other rights.

The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires equal protection under the law, and the institution of marriage certainly conveys legal advantages. Isn’t it then unconstitutional to deny any two men or two women those advantages?

Like the civil rights movement, the struggle for gender equity is likely to take 50 years. Some day, however, our children will marvel at old TV clips of our current political leaders awkwardly posturing on this issue, expressing their “shock” and scolding “activist judges.”

Equity will come, I am convinced, and we will be a better nation for it.

rrhoades@sunjournal.com

Copy the Story Link