by Joel Derfner
Except: way.
After John McCain conceded the presidential election to Barack Obama—the Prop 8 vote was still being counted—I called my dad to rejoice with him. When our initial effusions of happiness had spent themselves, I asked him how he felt.
“You know how people say, ‘I never dreamed I would see something like this in my lifetime’?” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, I did,” he said. “I did dream I would see something like this in my lifetime. And then there came a time when I stopped dreaming, because things changed. And tonight I’m dreaming again. I’m so excited about the future, and so full of hope. And, Joel, you’ve got a great country ahead of you.”
So when I went to bed on the night of November 4, I too was full of hope, because the United States had just elected a black president and because enough votes remained uncounted in California for me to believe that Proposition 8 might be defeated. But over the next few days, as the dust from the election settled, it transpired that the measure had passed with just over 52 percent of the Californian vote. Not an overwhelming majority, but enough to put marriage once again out of the reach of any same-sex couples who didn’t live in Massachusetts or Rhode Island.
“I don’t get it,” I said to Mike. “How could this happen?”
“I don’t know, babe.”
“I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”
Part of how it happened, the Internet revealed over the next few days, was that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints had given twenty million dollars to the Yes on 8 campaign (even though Mormons make up less than 2 percent of the population of California). The Internet was soon filled with pictures of Mormons going to temple on Sunday, November 9, in the face of crowds of hundreds and in some instances thousands of protesters.
“That suits me fine,” I told Mike, “given the hypocrisy of an attempt to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman by a sect whose founder took twenty-eight wives.”
“You are a very angry person,” he said.
But then same-sexers were presented with additional targets for our anger, one in particular: “The same voters who turned out strongest for Barack Obama,” read The Washington Post on November 7, “also drove a stake through the heart of same-sex marriage. Seven in ten African Americans who went to the polls voted yes on Proposition 8.”
“That’s disappointing,” said Mike.
“Yeah,” I said. “But there’s a strong Christian tradition in the black community, and religious people tend not to vote for marriage equality, so I guess I can understand.”
As this piece of data disseminated itself throughout the blogosphere, however, it seemed that there were a lot of people who disagreed with me (which I think is the real problem with the world, but that’s for another book).
“Many gays and lesbians worked hard to elect the first African American president,” I read in somebody’s comment on Queerty .com, “only to have African Americans betray us by voting against our equality in droves.” And I thought, You are a bad person with a small penis. Then I wrote in response, “Are you seriously suggesting you voted for Obama out of empathy for black people rather than because his record on LGBT issues was better than McCain’s and therefore more likely to benefit you?”
“You actually left that comment on a website?” asked Mike when I told him about this.
“No,” I said, “I just typed it and then didn’t send it. I may have a lot of bad ideas but I still know better than to get involved in an Internet discussion about politics.”
As time went on, though, the commentary seemed to me to get worse. “Hoodwinked,” read somebody else’s comment. “Bamboozled. By blacks. They, as an oppressed group of people, showed absolutely no empathy and had no problem doing to us what was done to them.” And I was like, You are a VERY bad person, and not only do you have a small penis but your clothes make you look fat. And this time, after I had clicked through to the commenter’s own blog and read a few posts to find out a little about him, the comment I typed with trembling fingers and didn’t send read, “Yes, marriage equality is an incredibly important issue. But you typed this comment in your office at your job, which brings you five or six figures a year, or from your computer, which you own, in the living room of your house, which you own, and which you’ve had the education and experience to get a decent mortgage on rather than something that’s going to leave you homeless and ruin your life, or maybe from your smartphone, which you own, on the way from your doctor’s office, where you can go because you’re insured, or maybe having just left for a massage at the spa, which you can afford, and you’re seriously comparing yourself to a whip-scarred slave picking cotton in the field wondering whether massa is going to be in the mood to rape her tonight?”
By now I had learned, from other, less popular websites, not only that the 70 percent figure quoted by The Washington Post was wildly inaccurate to begin with—and that any racial distinctions in Prop 8 voting patterns virtually disappeared when you asked about religion rather than race—but also that the black population of California was so small that in fact if every registered black voter in the state had voted against Prop 8 it still would have passed. (A convincing study done in 2009 by the International Humanities Center makes it pretty clear, by the way, that the only way Proposition 8 could have passed, given the statistics reported, was by means of election fraud, so really, no matter how many Californians voted against it, of no matter what religion and race, we’d have lost anyway.)
I had also learned, however, that Equality for All, the organization in charge of the No on 8 campaign, hadn’t done itself many favors in the black community. Of the dozens of TV spots they produced in the months leading up to the vote, not one targeted black people, portrayed a black couple, or ran on black TV stations. Black lesbian Jasmyne Cannick wrote an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times suggesting that Equality for All’s “occasional townhall meeting in Leimert Park—the one part of the black community where they now feel safe thanks to gentrification—to tell black people how to vote on something gay [wasn’t] effective outreach.” (Equality for All didn’t seem to have done much better with other communities of color; in a state where 17 percent of the voting demographic is Latino, for example, they produced exactly one TV spot in Spanish.)
This depressed me. Maybe “Equality for All” really meant Equality for All Whites, I thought spitefully. Or perhaps the No on 8 campaign had simply assumed, because blacks and Latinos are seen as less likely than others to be sympathetic to gay political aims, that they were a lost cause?
And I was like, what harm could energetic outreach have done, given that, only a few decades ago, calls to protect “traditional marriage” from “activist judges” determined to open it to “a population incapable of moral development” came from people trying to ban marriage between not same-sex couples but mixed-race couples? Did it not occur to anybody in the No on 8 campaign to point this out to black Californians?
In 1957, Virginia residents Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving went to Washington, D.C., to get married, since as an interracial couple—she was black , he was white—they were forbidden to marry by the state’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. (Laws like this one, by the way, forbade marriage not just between whites and blacks but also between whites and Asians, whites and Latinos, and so on. In fact, between 1875 and 1943, the immigration of Chinese women was so severely restricted that Chinese men in America were essentially forbidden to marry at all.)
Shortly after the Lovings’ return home they were arrested—police invaded their house hoping to interrupt them having sex but had to be content with using the marriage certificate on the wall as grounds to charge them—and convicted, their jail sentence suspended as long as they promised to leave Virginia for twenty-five years.
It took a decade, but eventually the Lovings ended up before the Supreme Court, which in 1967 ruled that anti-miscegenation laws violated the U.S. Constitution
: The freedom to marry, wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren, had “long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness.” Marriage was one of the “basic civil rights of man.”
The ruling needed some time to propagate—in fact, it seems to be propagating still, given that in 2009 a judge in Louisiana refused to marry an interracial couple, though at least after the story spread around he was forced to retire—but for all intents and purposes laws forbidding mixed-race couples to marry were dead in this country.
I’d always been aware that, after my parents moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to do civil rights work with the Lawyers’ Constitutional Defense Committee, one of the earliest cases they worked on resulted in the first legal interracial marriage in the state, but I’d never known any of the details, so at one point in college I made my father tell me the whole thing.
It was 1970, and Roger Mills, who was white, fell in love with Berta Linson, his black coworker at the NAACP. The week before their wedding they applied for a marriage license, but Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation statute, even though Loving v. Virginia had been decided three years earlier, was still on the books, and the county clerk denied their application.
The wedding was scheduled for Sunday, but when my father went to the local judge on Tuesday morning to ask for a hearing, the judge—a staunch segregationist who did not scruple to call black people “niggers” and “chimpanzees” from the bench—looking over his schedule, allowed as how, with some pending naturalizations and a golf tournament, he couldn’t see scheduling the hearing before Thursday afternoon; this meant, according to my father, that he would issue an order late Friday afternoon denying the marriage license, and the wedding would be off.
Immediately, my father called the appeals court—essentially the judge’s boss—and explained to them what was going on; after hearing the muttered cursing on the other end of the line, he was not surprised to get a call in short order from the judge’s secretary telling him that a hearing had been scheduled for early that afternoon. “In the meantime,” my dad told me, “just in case, I called the U.S. Supreme Court and let them know what was going on, and they said, Justice Marshall has the papers, if necessary—meaning if we had gotten nothing down below, we would have gotten some kind of an order from the Supreme Court.” (I think many of the problems in this country could be solved if it were still possible to say, “And then, just in case, I called the U.S. Supreme Court and let them know what was going on.” Then again, that would require a U.S. Supreme Court that actually believed in the Constitution, so I guess it’s not that simple.)
“Well,” my dad told me, “the local judge issued an order the next day, on Wednesday, in which he said something like, ‘I would have preferred to let the ordinary process of the law take its due course’—meaning that the Mississippi state court would take its time and finally review the thing and say, it’s reversed, long after the wedding was supposed to happen—‘but these people are planning a big interracial display of their romance this Sunday’—he actually used the words ‘a big interracial display of their romance,’ it’s right there on the piece of paper—‘and the appeals court told me, in no uncertain terms, that if I did not issue this order, they would.’”
And that Sunday my parents attended as big an interracial display of romance as Jackson had seen in a long time.
Several days after the Proposition 8 vote I was contemplating this story and a thought occurred to me. “Could Roger Mills and Berta Linson,” I asked my dad when I got him on the phone, “have just had the wedding ceremony that Sunday and then gone to a state with no anti-miscegenation law to get legally married the next week?”
He thought for a while. “Well, I guess they could have,” he said.
“But the idea never crossed their minds. Or any of your minds.”
“No.”
“But Mike and I decided to get married out of state and then have the ceremony in New York. Why were we okay with something that you found unacceptable in 1970? Have we become so inured to our oppression that we can’t even see we’re accepting second-class citizenship?”
“Gee. I don’t know.”
We talked about it for a while until we realized that same-sexers had decoupled modern legal marriage and ceremonial marriage (more on this later) by inventing the commitment ceremony in the late twentieth century; in 1970, without such a precedent, the idea never even occurred to my father and his colleagues and friends. (Of course American slaves had their own kind of commitment ceremony, but it had been a century since anybody had had to jump the broom instead of speaking vows.)
But that raised another question: why hadn’t interracial couples invented the commitment ceremony before Loving v. Virginia? My father and I supposed it must have been that there weren’t enough interracial couples for the idea to have gained critical mass, but it turns out that one in every twelve American marriages is now between people of different races, so maybe it was something different. Maybe the fact that many northern states had abolished their anti-miscegenation laws in the nineteenth century showed southern interracial couples that what they wanted to do was possible—just not where they lived. Whereas same-sexers could find no example of other same-sexers speaking wedding vows anywhere on earth, so there was a void in imaginative possibility that we filled with the commitment ceremony.
Or maybe Mike and I had become so inured to our oppression we couldn’t even see that we were accepting second-class citizenship.
In 1996, Eric Zorn wrote a brilliant column in The Chicago Tribune in which he listed a bunch of appalling things opponents of marriage equality for same-sex couples had said and then revealed that they had actually been said by opponents of marriage equality for interracial couples. Since he pretty much owns that trick I can’t repeat it here, but if you haven’t seen the column, which is worth reading, I’ve posted it on my website at joelderfner.com /zorn. In the meantime, let’s consider some comparisons.
Sexuality-Based Objections to Marriage Equality Race-Based Objections to Marriage Equality
“Support traditional marriage. Children must be raised with morals and principles.”
—California Senator Roy Ashburn, press release, 20051 “The social status of the children is bound to be low, their educational opportunities poor, and their moral background bad.”
—W. M. Castle, Biological and Sociological Consequences of Race Crossing, 1926
“The law of our state protects and preserves the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.”
—Alabama Attorney General Troy King, 20042 “The sanctity of . . . marriage and the home shall be upheld. . . . Miscegenation (sex relationship between the white and black races) is forbidden.”
—Production Code of the Motion Picture Industry, 1930
“Aware of the social stigma of living with homosexually-behaving adults, school-aged children generally suffer stress associated with their shame, embarrassment, [and] fears of peer rejection.”
—George Rekers, A Rational Basis for the Arkansas Regulation, 20043 “The progeny of a marriage between a Negro and a Caucasian suffer not only the stigma of such inferiority but the fear of rejection by members of both races.”
—John Shenk, California Supreme Court, Perez v. Sharp (dissent), 1948
“In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”
—Sen. Rick Santorum, AP interview, 20034 “A man can not commit so great an offence against his race, against his country, against his God, in any other way, as to give his daughter in marriage to a negro—a beast—or to take one of their females for his wife.”
—Buckner Payne, The Negro: What Is His Ethnological Status?, 1867
1. Shortly after saying this, Ashburn was arrested for drunk driving with a charming young fellow he’d picked up at a local gay ba
r in the passenger seat.
2. Shortly after saying this, King was discovered by his wife, we are told, in bed with a charming young fellow who, after joining King’s staff nine months earlier as an unpaid intern, was now earning $57,504 a year, because, according to King spokesman Chris Bence, the young fellow—only a few years out from being crowned homecoming king of a local university—was “indispensable in terms of the many functions he carrie[d] out in th[e] office.”
3. Shortly after writing this, Rekers was discovered on vacation with a charming young fellow he’d picked up on rentboy.com. Rekers explained that he’d hired the young man to help him with his luggage because of his recent surgery, which excuse held water until a photograph surfaced of Rekers struggling with a bunch of suitcases while the charming young fellow stood indolently and suggestively by.
4. Rick Santorum has yet to be discovered, as far as I’m aware, with a charming young fellow he picked up anywhere. I just wanted the opportunity to say that I could very easily have populated the left column of a much longer list like this entirely with the words of people who were later revealed to be in same-sex relationships of one kind or another, and if I had any problems populating the right column with people who were later revealed to have been in interracial relationships of one kind or another I suspect it would be only for lack of access to less reputable—which is to say more honest—sources.
And it goes on and on—priests who refuse to perform interracial marriages will be arrested, if we allow interracial marriages we might as well allow incestuous ones, you name it.
And I thought, if Equality for All had handed something like this table or Eric Zorn’s column out in black neighborhoods, the black vote in California would have split very differently than it did.
But when I emailed a friend of mine who works for an LGBT-rights organization about this question, he wrote back, “Honestly? Every bit of opinion and messaging research the LGBT organizations have ever done has shown that using civil rights movement imagery and comparisons in trying to talk about same-sex marriage to black people only backfires. And I’ve seen that happen time and time again myself. A lot of black people react badly when white same-sexers try to compare gay rights to civil rights. They think, ‘Oh, really? When was the last time anybody tried to keep you out of a voting booth?’ And that’s why that kind of argument wasn’t used in the Prop 8 battle.”