A friend of mine read the article I posted the other day. She was involved in the
struggle to legalize same-sex marriage in New York State. Several years before that legislation passed,
she was married to her longtime partner in Canada.
This friend and I were talking about what’s happened in
Utah, and about civil rights in general.
She reminded me of something which—surprisingly, given that the
legislation in New York passed only two and half years ago—I had forgotten.
Here it is: One
of the arguments made against passing the same-sex marriage law was that it
would discriminate against straight people, as it would not guarantee their
right to marry gay people.
I wondered what it is about same-sex marriage that
drives supposedly well-trained and talented legal minds to such contortions of
logic as the one she recalled-- or the argument, made by same-sex marriage foes
in Utah, that if diversity is a valid criterion for college admissions, it
should also be a criterion in deciding whether or not people should be allowed
to marry.
My friend had an explanation: When people who don’t have much else, they
will grasp onto whatever it is that (at least in their minds) separates them
from people who are even lower on the socioeconomic ladder than they are. Politicians like George Wallace, Richard
Nixon and Ronald Reagan exploited this; folks like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are
trying to do the same. How else can they
consider poor and working-class white people in the South and Midwest to vote
for candidates like themselves: the ones
who align themselves with the plutocrats who imperil whatever separates those
white people from the perpetually destitute blacks and other members of
“minority” groups.
It sounds, to me, like a good explanation of why, in
spite of the gains we’ve made, the condition of transgender people is still
like that of gays and lesbians thirty years ago.
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