Andrew Sullivan outlines dumb for us…

I have to say that this "news analysis" in the NYT of the court decisions in New York and Georgia is one of the dumbest pieces of journalism I have read in a very long time. "For Gay Rights Movement, A Key Setback"? In some ways, I think the New York Court of Appeals decision will help, rather than hurt, the cause of marriage equality in the long run. Why? Because it will force the issue into legislatures, where it is best tackled, and where we will eventually win, and in one case, California, have already won.

If Sullivan thinks that this country could have overcome race segregation at the polls in the 1950s and 60s, had the Warren court reaffirmed the constitutionality of race segregation instead of striking it down, he’s smoking crack.  Some states Still have those laws on the books, and voters have doggedly refused to remove them, even though they are no longer enforceable…

Alabama Vote Opens Old Racial Wounds

School Segregation Remains a State Law as Amendment Is Defeated

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — On that long-ago day of Alabama’s great shame, Gov. George C. Wallace (D) stood in a schoolhouse door and declared that his state’s constitution forbade black students to enroll at the University of Alabama.

He was correct.

If Wallace could be brought back to life today to reprise his 1963 moment of infamy outside Foster Auditorium, he would still be correct. Alabama voters made sure of that Nov. 2, refusing to approve a constitutional amendment to erase segregation-era wording requiring separate schools for "white and colored children" and to eliminate references to the poll taxes once imposed to disenfranchise blacks.

The vote was so close — a margin of 1,850 votes out of 1.38 million — that an automatic recount will take place Monday. But, with few expecting the results to change, the amendment’s saga has dragged Alabama into a confrontation with its segregationist past that illuminates the sometimes uneasy race relations of its present.

The outcome resonates achingly here in this college town, where the silver-haired men and women who close their eyes and lift their arms when the organ wails at Bethel Baptist Church — a short drive from Wallace’s schoolhouse door — don’t have to strain to remember riding buses past the shiny all-white school on their way to the all-black school.

"There are people here who are still fighting the Civil War," said Tommy Woods, 63, a deacon at Bethel and a retired school administrator. "They’re holding on to things that are long since past. It’s almost like a religion."

If the supreme court suddenly reversed itself on race segregation, you would, never doubt it, see some states rushing to put the Whites Only signs back up.  Perhaps not a majority of American states would do that.  And yes, those that did would suffer economic consequences, as people and corporations began to boycott them.  But you have to have seen racism in America, seen how endemic it is, seen how even poor white people will reliably vote against their economic interests to maintain their status over blacks, to appreciate its intractable power.  I’ve witnessed it first hand.  Without the courts again and again overruling the popular will of the voters, without a doubt we would still have legal race segregation in America today.

The roll of the courts is to protect the rights of the individual against the power of the other branches of government. The other branches of government speak for the people.  The courts speak for the constitution. They abdicate that responsibility, and all we are left with is mob rule, and that is what Sullivan is arguing for here.  The argument that Sullivan is making can also be made for letting the states decide on sodomy laws, which puts us right back where we were before Lawrence, criminals literally in some states, and second class citizens everywhere else.  Sodomy laws were used to justify discrimination against gay Americans in everything from custody battles to employment to equal housing laws.  Those laws reached across the borders of their states, and into the lives of gay Americans no matter where we lived.  These state laws and amendments banning same sex marriage will do the same.  Note how, even though same sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts, out of state gay couples cannot marry there if their home states do not allow it.  This is the situation mixed race couples faced, before Loving v. Virginia, another court decision that overruled the clear will of the majority of Americans.  The Lovings’ case came to the courts after the couple married where it was legal, and were arrested for doing so when they returned to Virginia.  The day is coming, when a same sex couple will find themselves under arrest, for exactly the same crime, and Sullivan is arguing that this is a good thing, and the courts should stay out of it.

Perhaps eventually gay citizens could find themselves one day in an America that was, for them, nearly half free and half not.  But we will never be completely free as Americans, until we are as a class equal to our heterosexual neighbors, in every state.  That will only happen, when the courts decide to do their fucking jobs, and defend the promise of liberty and justice for all in our constitution, against the tyranny of the mob.

In another post, Sullivan says we just need to "chill".   But as William Lloyd Garrison once said, tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm.