 JIM CROW FOR THEE BUT NOT FOR ME
Did you know that there's a homo TV network out there? I sure didn't! There's so much I could learn from such a network. God knows, I could use some fashion tips and advice on how to take something bigger than a girl's finger in my ass. Now I can get all my hetero heart can handle.
Rather, I could if only Logo TV were available to more than three people in West Hollywood. I guess you really can't take the mountain to Mohammad.
Despite the fact that no one was watching, Logo hosted a debate of sorts for most of the Democratic presidential candidates last night. Only Joe Biden and Chris Dodd weren't there because they are "all man."
As much as an event that couldn't be seen can garner headlines, most of them seem to be focused on Barack Obama's position on gay marriage. It certainly is an interesting one.
Sen. Barack Obama said Thursday he wanted to tap into the "core decency" of Americans to fight discrimination against gays and lesbians, and argued that civil unions for same-sex couples wouldn't be a "lesser thing" than marriage.
At a televised forum focusing on gay rights, the Illinois senator was asked to explain how civil unions for same-sex couples could be the equivalent of marriage. He said, "As I've proposed it, it wouldn't be a lesser thing, from my perspective." With the exception of Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, all of the Democrats (and most of the Republicans, when you get them drunk enough to admit it) support "civil unions" but refuse to endorse marriage for gay people. If you recognize that there is marriage discrimination occurring against gays, and if civil unions aren't a substantively "lesser thing" than marriage, why don't you just give them full marriage rights?
This is the same horseshit debate that conservatives have been having for decades about abortion. Pro-life conservatives will tell you that every life is a precious creation of god and the taking of such life should not be permitted by the state. Yet, even the most strident pro-lifer will tell you that he would allow exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. That exception explicitly acknowledges that some innocent life is more expendable than others, no?
If you believe in the preciousness of human life, it should make no difference whatsoever if that life is created by rape or incest. If you believe in such things, I cannot see how it can be argued that any such life is any less innocent or deserving of protection. If pro-life conservatives were in any way intellectually consistent, the only exception to a ban on abortion would maybe be the life of the mother. I can't see how you can sanctify "innocent life" while creating levels of acceptable innocence regarding that life without looking profoundly silly.
I have far more respect for the lunatics who want total, outright bans on abortion than I do the mainstream "conservative" position. While I completely reject it, at least I can't argue against their intellectual consistency or integrity.
The same reasoning applies to gay marriage. If you have followed the American debate on the issue for the last four years, here's what you've heard;
"I'm against gay marriage, but I enthusiastically support civil unions."
Okay. What's the difference?
"Well, civil unions are substantively the same as marriage - but different."
How is it different?
"Well, it isn't called marriage."
What if it was?
"I couldn't support that! Are you insane?"
Why not?
"Because marriage is between a man and a woman!"
So why give all of the benefits and responsibilities of marriage to homosexuals when you don't believe they should be married?
"Because it's a matter of civil rights and basic fairness." I've spent years trying to make sense of that and all I accomplished was getting a headache. Leave it to John Kerry and Dick Cheney to make someone who comes right out and says "I'm against it because I hate faggots" look respectable by comparison. When you burrow through the unbelievable bullshit of the "mainstream" position, you quickly conclude that its only real purpose is to pander to those who actually do hate faggots while not looking like bigoted assholes themselves.
Obama's position is of particular interest to me because - like his position on invading and possibly using nuclear weapons on Pakistan - he keeps digging himself into an untenable position.
"Semantics may be important to some. From my perspective, what I'm interested (in) is making sure that those legal rights are available to people," he said.
"If we have a situation in which civil unions are fully enforced, are widely recognized, people have civil rights under the law, then my sense is that's enormous progress," the Illinois Democrat said. That's pretty neat. The first serious black candidate for president in American history is essentially endorsing Plessy v. Ferguson without actually saying so.
If you've never read the 1896 Plessy decision, you really should. Not only is it compelling reading, it neatly summarizes the justification of the legal segregation African Americans lived under for the first half of the Twentieth Century. Plessy established the Constitutional doctrine of "seperate but equal." No reasonable person today would dare to defend the decision. Unless of course you're applying it to homosexuals.
Since Senator Obama went to the Harvard School of Law, I assume that he's read Plessy and I assume that he's possessed of the imagination to replace the phrase "railroad car" with "marriage." Blacks were given their seperate but equal schools and water fountains for fifty years. Barack Obama wants to give gays their seperate but equal civil unions.
The problem is that those civil unions are inherently unequal under the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (or DOMA.) DOMA specifically allowed the states not to recognize the civil unions or gay marriages performed outside their respective jurisdictions. However, that applies only to civil unions and gay marriages. Heterosexual marriages are protected by the "full faith and credit" clause of the Constitution, just as driver's licenses are.
That being the case, DOMA - and civil unions themselves - will likely be found unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment's "equal protection" clause.
Given his position on gay marriage, one can reasonably assume that Obama supports DOMA. If true, that makes everything he said last night meaningless drivel. He would have been much better off if he just said "If I were running for governor of Illinois, this would be a valid discussion, but I'm a candidate for president - an office that has nothing at all to do with marriage." That at least would be closer to the truth.
In closing, I give you a portion of the great Justice Harlan's almost poetic lone dissent in Plessy. It is far more eloquent on the illogic and evil of the "seperate but equal" doctrine than either Senator Obama or I could ever hope to be.
The sure guaranty of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, national and state, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States, without regard to race. State enactments regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race, and cunningly devised to defeat legitimate results of the [163 U.S. 537, 561] war, under the pretense of recognizing equality of rights, can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned. This question is not met by the suggestion that social equality cannot exist between the white and black races in this country. That argument, if it can be properly regarded as one, is scarcely worthy of consideration; for social equality no more exists between two races when traveling in a passenger coach or a public highway than when members of the same races sit by each other in a street car or in the jury box, or stand or sit with each other in a political assembly, or when they use in common the streets of a city or town, or when they are in the same room for the purpose of having their names placed on the registry of voters, or when they approach the ballot box in order to exercise the high privilege of voting.
There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But, by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race. It is scarcely just to say that a colored citizen should not object to occupying a public coach assigned to his own race. He does not object, nor, perhaps, would he object to separate coaches for his race if his rights under the law were recognized. But he does object, and he ought never to cease objecting, that citizens of the white and black races can be adjudged criminals because they sit, or claim the right to sit, in the same public coach on a public highway. [163 U.S. 537, 562] The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds. If evils will result from the commingling of the two races upon public highways established for the benefit of all, they will be infinitely less than those that will surely come from state legislation regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race. We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens,-our equals before the law. The thin disguise of 'equal' accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done.
The result of the whole matter is that while this court has frequently adjudged, and at the present term has recognized the doctrine, that a state cannot, consistently with the constitution of the United States, prevent white and black citizens, having the required qualifications for jury service, from sitting in the same jury box, it is now solemnly held that a state may prohibit white and black citizens from sitting in the same passenger coach on a public highway, or may require that they be separated by a 'partition' when in the same passenger coach. May it not now be reasonably expected that astute men of the dominant race, who affect to be disturbed at the possibility that the integrity of the white race may be corrupted, or that its supremacy will be imperiled, by contact on public highways with black people, will endeavor to procure statutes requiring white and black jurors to be separated in the jury box by a 'partition,' and that, upon retiring from the court room to consult as to their verdict, such partition, if it be a movable one, shall be taken to their consultation room, and set up in such way as to prevent black jurors from coming too close to their brother jurors of the white race. If the 'partition' used in the court room happens to be stationary, provision could be made for screens with openings through [163 U.S. 537, 563] which jurors of the two races could confer as to their verdict without coming into personal contact with each other. I cannot see but that, according to the principles this day announced, such state legislation, although conceived in hostility to, and enacted for the purpose of humiliating, citizens of the United States of a particular race, would be held to be consistent with the constitution.
I do not deem it necessary to review the decisions of state courts to which reference was made in argument. Some, and the most important, of them, are wholly inapplicable, because rendered prior to the adoption of the last amendments of the constitution, when colored people had very few rights which the dominant race felt obliged to respect. Others were made at a time when public opinion, in many localities, was dominated by the institution of slavery; when it would not have been safe to do justice to the black man; and when, so far as the rights of blacks were concerned, race prejudice was, practically, the supreme law of the land. Those decisions cannot be guides in the era introduced by the recent amendments of the supreme law, which established universal civil freedom, gave citizenship to all born or naturalized in the United States, and residing ere, obliterated the race line from our systems of governments, national and state, and placed our free institutions upon the broad and sure foundation of the equality of all men before the law.
I am of opinion that the state of Louisiana is inconsistent with the personal liberty of citizens, white and black, in that state, and hostile to both the spirit and letter of the constitution of the United States. If laws of like character should be enacted in the several states of the Union, the effect would be in the highest degree mischievous. Slavery, as an institution tolerated by law, would, it is true, have disappeared from our country; but there would remain a power in the states, by sinister legislation, to interfere with the full enjoyment of the blessings of freedom, to regulate civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race, and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens, now constituting a part of the political community, called the [163 U.S. 537, 564] 'People of the United States,' for whom, and by whom through representatives, our government is administered. Such a system is inconsistent with the guaranty given by the constitution to each state of a republican form of government, and may be stricken down by congressional action, or by the courts in the discharge of their solemn duty to maintain the supreme law of the land, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.
It might just be time for Barack Obama to break out his law books again. He is essentially resting on a Constitutional theory which, if still in practice, would have denied him the opportunity to run for president in the first place.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: The Chimes of Freedom By: Bob Dylan
From: Another Side of Bob Dylan
PermalinkLabels: Fun With Politics, I Fought The Law, The Interfaith Dental Clinic, The Smart Boy Blues
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