Judge overturns Calif. gay marriage ban (AP via Yahoo! News)
It is one of the most (in)famous videos of its era. Freshly installed as the governor of Alabama, George Wallace stands before a cheering crowd during his inaugural address to the state and declares, in a booming voice, that in Alabama there will be “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” It’s hard to call it the most galling video of the time, in the face of white police officers turning fire hoses on young African-Americans, terrifying them with police dogs, and, most horrifying of all, white mobs lynching African-Americans. For as evil as segregation was, it is easy to understand how African-Americans in the south might not have worried so much about it when they were living in daily fear of being strung up by their necks.
However, Wallace’s declaration continues to stand out, nearly fifty years later, in large part because unlike the videos of police brutality or lynchings, George Wallace was an elected official, someone chosen by the voters of Alabama to represent all their interests. Public office is a sacred institution, and although it’s easy to forget in an era where corporate cash and slick public relations firms cast two heavy clouds over the American electoral process, when one is elected to public office, one is elected to serve and protect the interests and rights of the entire electorate, not just those who voted for you, not just those who can donate lots of money to your reelection campaigns, and not just those who are popular with the electorate.
It is precisely this trust that George Wallace abnegated when he so virulently opposed the desegregation of this state. No matter how much the voters of Alabama may have wanted to keep segregation intact, no matter how hot or how loud their hatred of non-Caucasians was, Wallace had a duty to protect the rights of everyone in Alabama, no matter their race, no matter the colour of their skin. Wallace’s stubbornness in perpetuating the horrid institution of segregation — an institution the American south developed after it could no longer enslave African-Americans — has earned him one of the most ignominious spots in American history.
Fifty years before Wallace’s speech, the nation was torn by the matter of women’s suffrage. It’s hard to believe that fewer than a hundred years ago, American women did not have a constitutionally-protected right to vote. Had video camera technology been more advanced and widespread then, it is doubtless that there would be equally repugnant videos to play of suffrage opponents explaining in the most tortured and repulsive ways that women are too mercurial, or too uneducated, or just too stupid to vote. Fair-minded Americans would react to such videos the same way they react to Wallace’s “segregation forever” pledge today, with a sad shake of their heads and a nagging disbelief that, so relatively recently in American history, there could be such widespread idiocy in this country.
The march of history towards equality for all people is clear and it is unstoppable. There have been obstacles on the path and setbacks, but as each new generation sees America through fresh eyes, they come to realize more and more that our commonalities are far more important than our differences, that differences in skin tone, or ethnicity, or gender, or gender identity, or sexuality, are no justification for the undertow of hate that has sadly continued to wash away some of the progress this country has made towards that most American promise of all, the promise that in this country, no matter how different you are, and no matter what other citizens may think of you, you will be recognized as equal to every other person under the law. Even George Wallace himself renounced segregation late in his life.
Today, with the striking down of California’s discriminatory Proposition 8, another obstacle in the path of freedom has been removed. Supporters of the proposition can talk all they want about how the decision of Judge Vaughn Walker overturned the narrow decision of California voters to ban same-sex marriage in their state, but granting equal rights to all Americans is something that should never be a matter for public vote. Just as most of the country saw slavery as a justified institution two hundred years ago, just as a hundred years ago the country was gripped by anti-immigrant sentiments and a strong tide of anti-Semitism, just as fifty years ago the American south fought to maintain legalized segregation, just as twenty-five years ago the religious right demonized non-heterosexuals, today you can turn on any news broadcast and see evidence of the new anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping the nation, the continued demonization of Arabs and Muslims by some in the wake of the 09.11 attacks, the moral panic the right wing bellows through all its media channels at this very moment about how the ability of same-sex couples to legally wed somehow constitutes a threat to heterosexual marriages, to public health, to morality, to what they claim are “American values.”
Worse yet is the discrimination and demonization we don’t see, that we aren’t aware of, even though we may be committing it ourselves. Although the gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities have made great progress towards equality in the past twenty years, the transgender community has not enjoyed nearly as much success, in large part because other members of the “queer community” didn’t push for transgender recognition with the same ferocity since they didn’t think transgender people were “marketable” enough, that they couldn’t overcome the stereotype that transgender women were all “really” gay men who wanted to “trick” straight men into having sex with them, so why bother trying? The plights of intersex, gender-fluid, and gender-queer people continues to register too low on the queer community’s radar, if it even registers at all.
Sometimes it takes the form of an angry speech delivered by some smug, self-righteous politician on his or her bully pulpit. Sometimes it takes the form of a hate-filled blog post passed around to millions of other hate-filled people by the Internet. Sometimes it takes the form of a joke on a “comedic” television show that invites its audience to make fun of people who are different from them. It can be as brazen as a white supremacist rally, or as couched as the disconnected rhetoric of Rand Paul. It can be delivered with the angry indignation of a Rush Limbaugh, or the brackish belligerence of a Sean Hannity, or the belittling snarkiness of a Sarah Palin. It can be an open call to arms, to defend against the menace no matter what form it takes, or it can be buffeted with an insincere call to still respect, in some insignificant way, the other who is being so slandered. Even George Wallace ended his inaugural address with a call to bless all the people of Alabama, “both white and black.”
No matter what form it takes, it all boils down to the same thing: A call to pay close attention to the otherness of those who aren’t like you in some way, and an argument that this otherness is a cause for revulsion, a reason for you, and that person, and everyone else “like you” to come together and reject this otherness. For George Wallace and much of the American south of the era, this meant keeping African-Americans as far away from white people as possible, under the laughable notion of “separate but equal” facilities. For the supporters of Proposition 8 and other measures designed to prevent same-sex couples from enjoying the same privileges and benefits opposite-sex couples enjoy, it means pursuing legal measures to legitimize and codify discrimination against gay men, lesbian women, and bisexuals. For others it has been a call to arms, whether the lynchings of one or two or more people, or genocide. This is not to say that legal discrimination is as bad as violence against a minority group, but it is to say that both come from the same underlying assumption, the same sick emotion called hatred.
In 1857, before this country descended into Civil War, our Supreme Court decided in the Dred Scott decision that Americans of African descent could never be considered United States citizens. Court decisions prevented the enactment of women’s suffrage and race-based civil rights before these measures of equality were finally achieved. Should the Proposition 8 case go to the Supreme Court, given the court’s current composition, it seems likely that Judge Walker’s decision will be overturned, and marriage discrimination will once again be the law of the land in California, if not the whole nation. If past is prologue, though, there will come a time, likely sooner than later, that people of power will make the decision, no matter how unpopular, no matter how expedient, that same-sex couples deserve all the rights of opposite-sex couples, and marriage equality will be finally and permanently codified for all of America.
For those who continue to preach doctrines of hate, for those who continue to argue that non-heterosexuals should be legally treated like second-class citizens, it would be instructive to look at the video of George Wallace’s 1963 inaugural address, or to read the transcript. Sometime in the future — maybe it will take fifty years, maybe thirty, maybe ten — the people of America will look at the videos being produced today of people like you arguing for maintaining legal discrimination against non-heterosexuals with the same disbelief, the same contempt for such brazen displays of hatred and intolerance, as people feel today when they hear or read of George Wallace promising “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
Many of us already do.
