Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and President George W. Bush have a surprise up their sleeves. Since last July, the two Republicans have been leading the front to constitutionally bring the axe down on gay marriage. This would make it unconstitutional for any state to allow a legal union between two men or two women.
Imagine that it would be unconstitutional to allow certain rights to a legitimate minority. Quite a step for the so-called “land of the free,” isn’t it?
So, why is the gay community’s most prominent issue on the hot seat?
Last April, Senator Rick Santorum claimed, “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, and you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”
What’s to be made of this White House-backed remark? It seems to imply that homosexual relations are a gateway into deeper acts of perversion. The only thing that could possibly come to mind is the right-wing neurosis of preserving Christian values. Perhaps by restricting the gays, they feel there will be no chance of compromise for adulterers, molesters, and the incestuous. When it comes down to it, this attitude reeks of Cold War cultural residue.
What business does the federal government have in defining our morals for us? Are conservatives implying that Americans don’t know where to draw the line of decency? This is where another excuse comes into play: the lamest, most abstract mantra to come out of the fanatical right: to preserve the “Sanctity of Marriage.”
Most gay couples are not even concerned with any religious aspect of marriage. All they simply look for is the rights of next of kin that heterosexuals enjoy. When a man gets sick, his partner can be allowed in to see him in intensive care. If he dies, his estate can go to his partner by default. They could share benefits, and raise a child – things that heterosexuals take for granted.
Besides, in a country with a 50-plus percent divorce rate, where you can get married at a drive-thru window, “sanctity” may not exactly be at the top of everyone’s list nowadays.
But just as long as one gown and one tux stands at the altar, the ultra-right don’t even care if an Elvis impersonator marries them. Heterosexuality is sacred enough. The bride and groom don’t even have to speak the same language, and sometimes, there’s heavy postage involved!
The right-wing agenda to amend the constitution is as extreme as it gets. Even the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (a.k.a. “Stalin’s Constitution”) made no reference to the regulation of marriage. Not even 150 million communists over a 74-year span resorted to constitutional regulation of marriage. America may be the first to do so, solely on the vision of religious ideologies.
Ironically, Frist, Bush, and the Republican Party itself are working against their own ideology of “small government.” They’ve been duped into believing that a federal government that regulates the institution of marriage is still “small government.”
They don’t seem to mind that if you sell a kidney to keep the lights on, but they want to make sure the bedrooms of America are regulated to the full extent of the federal law. Isn’t individual jurisdiction of states on such laws as marriage one of the keys to America’s free society? Apparently, not when God’s work must be done.
Normally the ultra-right has no problem attacking the left-wing ideology of strong government, but this time they obviously answer to a higher calling. They just refuse to tell us what that calling is. Whatever it is, it finds gay people to be less human than the biblically ordained protocol that Bush and company think they emulate.
But don’t expect them to come out of the closet on this anti-gay agenda. They will only go as far as making foolish abstractions to cover up a covert bible fetish.
