Strengthening marriage and society
In its equal-rights struggle over recent decades, the American
gay-rights movement has been understandably clamorous. But it is partly a
quieter revolution in gay life that led to the Supreme Judicial Court's
endorsement of civil gay marriage in Massachusetts this month and to the
likely wide acceptance of same-sex marriage across the United States over
time. Gay-rights opponents sometimes make political hay fulminating against
"activists" and "agendas," but where they fail is in their portrayal of
ordinary lesbian and gay citizens as "sick" or "dangerous" or "immoral."
With gay men and women coming out of the closet by the millions in recent
years, most heterosexuals have the evidence of their own eyes, and they now
know better than to accept the ugly caricatures.
It's not that gay stereotypes are always inaccurate; some people fit
even the worst ones. But gay and lesbian Americans are, by and large,
pretty much like everyone else, and it has been the willingness to come out
in large numbers to their families, friends and co-workers that has begun to
inoculate gay Americans against the smears of the domestic ayatollahs and
their hysterical followers. It's easier to hate an abstraction than it is
to hate your child or sibling or cousin, or that nice same-sex couple next
door who keep their home up, volunteer at church and take their kids to the
Halloween parade.
It is this visible, socially healthy reality that is surely a factor
in recent state poll results on gay marriage. In a Boston Globe/WBZ-TV poll
completed after the SJC decision, fully 50 percent of people in the
commonwealth are shown to favor gay marriage and only 38 percent oppose it.
A Boston Herald poll produced similar results. Younger people are more
pro-gay-marriage than older ones, and more women are for it than men. But
the overall result is clear and a pro-gay-rights trend is unmistakable.
Nationally, the picture is more problematical for gays, with only
about a third of Americans favoring same-sex civil marriage. But any
members of the Massachusetts Legislature who watch poll results ought to
study the Globe number. In most districts, it is no longer politically
risky to support gay marriage. The opposite may in fact be true. These
figures bode well, too, for gay marriage to survive any state
constitutional-amendment referendum that might make its way to the ballot.
And Governor Mitt Romney, Attorney General Thomas Reilly and others who
advocate a "civil-unions" compromise to dangle before the SJC - which in any
case said marriage and meant marriage - will be representing what is now
demonstrably a minority viewpoint.
Increasingly, Bay State residents reject phony slippery-slope
arguments - as if in 10 years a large, pro-incest movement might gather on
Boston Common - as well as "tradition is everything" arguments, which were
used in the past to justify traditional-marriage horrors such as husbands
owning their wives' property and not vice versa, and legal rape by husbands
of their wives. Over the centuries, civil marriage has evolved, wisely and
humanely, and now it is happening again. Gay marriage can only strengthen
the institution and, with its fair-minded inclusiveness and encouragement of
stability, all of society.
'Freedom to Marry Rings' image upper right © H. Mitchell.
