In the May issue I discussed the dangers of the Selma analogy, the approach to gay rights that seeks to adopt the strong and often coercive measures that were developed to fight against racial discrimination.
Well, it seems that the Canadians are well ahead of us. The province of Quebec has launched a state funded registry that will collect reports of “homophobic” acts, which includes “any negative word or act toward a homosexual or homosexuality in general: physical abuse, verbal abuse, intimidation, harassment, offensive graffiti, abuse, injurious mockery, inappropriate media coverage and discrimination.”
There is the unpleasant aroma of the police state in this.
June 19th, 2012 | 11:33 am
The Quebec registry of homophobia allegations is at best a very silly idea and at worst potentially like something out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But since the United States does not do anything similar to this regarding race or any other category of persons protected by anti-discrimination laws, I certainly don’t see it happening with homosexuality. So Canadians are not well ahead of us. They have gone somewhere the United States is never going to go.
June 19th, 2012 | 11:46 am
Never say never. The United States was never going to seriously consider homosexual marriage in the first place either.
June 19th, 2012 | 9:21 pm
since the United States does not do anything similar to this regarding race or any other category of persons protected by anti-discrimination laws
We keep registries of “sex offenders”, and we are not careful to distinguish real sex offenders from people whose violations of the law were youthful or otherwise not in keeping with the spirit of the original intent.
These registries severely limit where a person can live, and where they can go. They are designed to create a lifelong and very public stigma, similar to the scarlet “A”.
While this is a registry designed to punish sexual offenders, rather than one designed to punish sexual dissenters, I really don’t see much difference between the groups of people who dedicate their life to hating pedophiles vs. the irrational hatred and political authoritarianism of the “Bash Back!” crowd. They are moral zealots, concerned entirely with hating and punishing those whom they blame for the existence of evil in their world.
June 20th, 2012 | 12:28 am
Something about “the Selma analogy” that ought to be pointed out is that the reason blacks are singled out for special treatment in terms of the state taking responsibility for ending racism, is because blacks were singled out for special treatment by the state and that is the cause of their situation.
Our nation was founded on certain assumptions, premises, and ideals. Slavery was counter to all of it, but we did it anyway, even though even the founders of our nation knew it was wrong. There was never a time when Americans did not realize slavery was wrong, a contradiction of the very principles of our founding. We created a state with this untenable contradiction, and that is ultimately why the state had to repair the damage that the state had done.
I continue to believe that whatever benefits blacks have gained from the way our nation has “helped” them, has been gained at a far higher cost than should have happened. Not only has the coercive nature of the “help” created a backlash effect, it has also had unwanted effects in terms of redistributing responsibility – of confusing what is rightfully the state’s responsibility to provide, and what is rightfully an individual’s responsibility to earn.
June 20th, 2012 | 8:18 am
That’s the same United States where same-sex marriage has been adopted by numerous states and seems to be growing in popularity nation-wide?
June 20th, 2012 | 10:53 am
“Numerous” Mr. McDonald? The actual number is six and in all six of those cases the right was granted via legislative action or judicial fiat. 42 states on the other hand prohibit SSM either by statute (12) or by state constitutional amendment.
As for the “growing popularity” of SSM, the polls may indicate that this is so, but when put to a referendum the results say (overwhelmingly) differently. North Carolina being just the most recent addition (by a margin of 39-61). In fact since 1998 the question has been put to a state ballot 32 times. 31 times the voters have rejected SSM. The single exception was in Arizona in 2006. However, in 2008 the Arizona voters amended the state constitution to affirm statutory language banning SSM.
It does not serve the argument for SSM (which I presume you support) to distort its legislative history and inflate its public popularity. Neither are any better reasons for adopting SSM than for rejecting it.
Nor are inapt comparisons to Selma and the struggle for African American civil rights (the point of this post). By almost all of the common markers (employment, income, housing, voting rights, etc) used to measure discrimination folks in the gay community suffer no negative effect — rather the opposite in fact.
The fact that many folks in historically oppressed communities do not see this struggle as analogous to their own can clearly be seen in the recent vote in North Carolina. In the the two counties with the highest percentage of African American voters in the state the marriage amendment passed by margins of more than two to one. The inference is rather clear, advocates of SSM will need to refine their case and move away from comparisons to the era of Jim Crow and Civil Rights.
June 20th, 2012 | 11:40 am
david c. –
Seems to point to a difference between the general population and those motivated to vote, actually.
Conceivably the causation is backwards on that one, though – people with secure income and housing feel safe enough to be open about their homosexuality?
It does seem to me to be more analogous to religious persecution, I admit.
June 20th, 2012 | 11:46 am
The fact that many folks in historically oppressed communities do not see this struggle as analogous to their own can clearly be seen in the recent vote in North Carolina.
david c.,
That many black people object to comparisons between the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement doesn’t mean the analogy isn’t a defensible one. It just means a lot of people don’t like it. No analogy is perfect.
By almost all of the common markers (employment, income, housing, voting rights, etc) used to measure discrimination folks in the gay community suffer no negative effect — rather the opposite in fact.
I think it is mistaken to hold (if it is your position, which it seems to be) that anti-discrimination policy or legislation is necessary only if whole classes of people, or whole communities, are discriminated against. I would imagine only a miniscule number of Catholics are turned down when applying for a job or trying to rent an apartment. That doesn’t mean that when it happens, anti-discrimination laws shouldn’t come into play.
The inference is rather clear, advocates of SSM will need to refine their case and move away from comparisons to the era of Jim Crow and Civil Rights.
The NAACP doesn’t seem to agree, since they just endorsed same-sex marriage last month.
June 20th, 2012 | 1:16 pm
Ray,
Since, in our democracy the only “popularity” that makes any legal difference is the vote of the people my point stands. Is SSM really “growing in popularity” (McDonald’s point) when it is 0 for 31 at the ballot box? Those results raise the question (or at least should) for advocates of SSM as to whether or not their position is growing in favorability as much as they claim? Note please, that I am not speaking to the rightness or wrongness of SSM in this case. I am making the rather elementary point that measures of popularity tell us little about the justice (or injustice) of a particular stance.
Backwards causation? Hmmm. I had not thought of reading the data set that way, but again, regardless of how one reads the data it seems pretty clear that the “Selma analogy” is inapt. Visible, measurable, quantitiative, impact is to my mind the only sensible legal standard we have for adjudicating on matters of civil right. The rest gets awfully near to the kind of “thought police’ concerns that Reno references above.
As for the prohibition against SSM being more akin to religious persecution (as opposed to racial discrimination) — without conceding that it is “religious persecution” I’ll grant that that’s at least closer to the mark in terms of the appropriate grounds for legal discussion.
June 20th, 2012 | 1:50 pm
David,
So the people who are most in the position to understand the “Selma analogy” from personal experience seem, by their voting patterns (at least) to reject that analogy, and your response is “big deal, no analogy is perfect”? That’s a response one can choose, I suppose, but it certainly would create in me some doubt about the reasonableness or (more to the point) the persuasiveness of said analogy.
Can we agree that the purpose of an analogy in a context like this is to draw a sympathetic (and legal, moral etc) connection to an historic injustice in order to move and persuade public hearts and minds? If so, then when the folks most directly impacted by that historic injustice seem to consistently and pervasively reject the analogy , it seems to me only prudent to reconsider the appropriateness of the analogy.
Besides, lets bring a little bit of historical reality to the table here. There have no doubt been ugly and cruel injustices perpetrated upon homosexual persons, but it is absurdly reductive if not downright insulting to compare those injustices to the experiences of chattel slavery and Jim Crow. It’s bad history and worse public relations.
As for your question to me about “whole classes” not needing to be affected for civil rights law to come into play, I find myself confused. What we are talking about here is measured in precisely (and only) that way. Your own analogy gives a perfect example. It is solely because your hypothetical person belongs to the class or community called “Catholic” that he or she has standing to pursue redress on the grounds of religious discrimination. In other words the issue is not the number of people affected, it is whether or not they are a member of what society has determined is a “protected” group. The right of redress is attached to the group and then applied to the person. On this I think we are probably agreed.
But then a prior set of questions needs to be engaged which is “should this class of persons or community be entitled to special protection under the law” and “why should they be granted this protection”. The classic reponse to this question in civil rights legislation has been to demonstrate harm or the impingement of personal freedoms and rights. That is to say that there has been demonstrable measurable harm siginificant enough to have at least potentially affected the entire class of persons.
Which get us to my point that at least in terms of the measurables typically used in deciding the question of harm and redress in civil rights legislation homosexuals as a class or community do not reflect said harms….
That is not intended, by the way, to excuse unjust, illegal, or immoral behavior directed towards gay persons, but it is to say that adjudicating it from a civil rights point of view not the best approach.
As for the NAACP coming out for SSM I think we both know that that’s probably about power politics and not about reflecting the attitudes and desires of the folks the NAACP claims to represent.
June 21st, 2012 | 6:54 am
david c wrote
“when the folks most directly impacted by that historic injustice seem to consistently and pervasively reject the analogy , it seems to me only prudent to reconsider the appropriateness of the analogy.”
Surely one would wish to consider whether they were rejecting it as an analogy absolutely, or only as an analogy of proportionality. Analogy of attribution would seem to be inapplicable, for the relationship is hardly prior and posterior, but that would still leave analogy of participation or imitation
June 21st, 2012 | 8:54 am
david c. –
Given that (a) there’s a sharp difference in support of ‘same-sex marriage’ along age lines, and (b) there’s a sharp difference in voting turnout along age lines, and (b) younger people become older people, I’m not so sure your point will hold eternally.
And yet there exist measures (and incidents) indicating homosexuals are subject to discrimination. Not chattel slavery, perhaps (though if we’re going all the way back to that time period, there’s the whole death or ‘just’ castration thing), but certainly calling for redress.
If “adjudicating it from a civil rights point of view [may] not [be] the best approach”, do you have some suggestions for a better one?
June 21st, 2012 | 9:28 am
The sole reason to use an analogy in making a case is to persuade. This analogy does not persuade those who are in the best position to understand the analogy. Whether they reject it due to proportionality or otherwise is irrelevant.
I suggest the analogy is not being used to make a case. It may be an exercise in self-righteousness: “We’ve been treated as badly as they have and they were protected. It’s only fair.” It may be a cynical attempt to cloak a cause in the soundness of someone else’s cause, given the lack of reasons in the first place. It may be any number of things or even all of such things distributed across the people who claim them.
What it is not is persuasive.
As to the difference in surveys, it’s straightforward. Those that are trumpeted by gay rights activists are of the 2000 or fewer phone calls to randomly selected individuals type. Those that make a difference in law involve hundreds or thousands if not millions of voters using a secret ballot.
June 21st, 2012 | 10:20 am
Ray,
I never said my point would “hold eternally” it is as subject to time and change as anything else (like the “Selma analogy” itself?). But for the moment, it seems to me that the secret ballot is a better measure of the popular will than opinion polling on the matter.
As for redress, I am all for it when a crime or violation of a civil code has been committed. But the crimes you reference (unlawful search, false imprisonment,castration, murder) are crimes regardless of the sexual orientation of the victim, are they not? Victims of those crimes or their families have means of redress through the legal code already, don’t they? Why are special (ie “class”) protections necessary?
But we are getting rather far afield here. The issue to hand is the aptness of the “Selma analogy” and Mike Melendez did a far better job than I in explaining it’s weaknesses and lack of persuasive power. So …”what Mike said”…..
June 21st, 2012 | 1:13 pm
That many black people object to comparisons between the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement doesn’t mean the analogy isn’t a defensible one. It just means a lot of people don’t like it. No analogy is perfect.
But the reason why blacks resent it is telling.
They made their case, and now you are using them to avoid making yours.
You can’t piggyback on black civil rights – not honestly, anyway. It’s dishonest. The gay rights movement is exploiting the black community and trying to feed off its hard-earned political capital..
Blacks worked hard to persuade America of the justness of their case. The outcome was hard-negotiated. The entire process took years.
Gay rights activists have no right to try to steal that political capital to avoid working hard themselves.
It is greedy.
It is antisocial.
It is a form of bullying.
Those who want change have an obligation to go through due process. Gay rights activists know they can’t really argue that what they want is just and fair, and that’s why they have to rely on the justness of Selma, instead of the justness of their own case.
June 21st, 2012 | 1:39 pm
Mike Melendez –
Well, the analogy would seem to be persuasive to the ones in the very best position to judge it. And some others, it would seem.
Restricting the vote based on race was illegal, too. For that matter, so was lynching. But even such things aren’t the whole of the matter. Should it be legal to discriminate in hiring or housing based on sexual orientation? (I’ll note that Jews in general tend to be higher up the socioeconomic measures too, but anti-Semitism is still seen as a civil rights issue…)
And then there are cases where the law itself is alleged to be unjust. Do you think Lawrence v. Texas was improperly decided?
June 21st, 2012 | 1:40 pm
Whoops, I mixed up two different people in my response. The second blockquote is from david c.
June 21st, 2012 | 1:43 pm
Blake –
Well, maybe one of the lessons of Selma is that we don’t have to make everyone go through police dogs and hoses to establish the justness of their cause?
How much of the “process” that ‘blacks’ went through was actually “due”?
June 21st, 2012 | 4:23 pm
Well, maybe one of the lessons of Selma is that we don’t have to make everyone go through police dogs and hoses to establish the justness of their cause?
Gay rights activists today wish someone would turn fire hoses on them. They go into Mormon spaces and behave in sexually inappropriate ways for the express purpose of violating peoples’ sexual boundaries, with the express hope that someone will react in a way that can be used as proof that they are “oppressed”.
But today it is the gay rights activists who are the bullies. As in so many other ways, they want to be seen as like black civil rights activists, but they are really mirror-reverse images.
June 21st, 2012 | 4:54 pm
Ray (and David N.?)
Our discussion has been nagging at the back of my mind because there has seemed something not quite right (or analogous?) in the responses you have been making. I think I may have put a finger on what I think the issue is — at least between us.
The case for black civil rights was born out of a clear, sustained, institutionalized, history of majority (white) culture denial of basic (that is Constitutionally defined) civil rights. What African Americans in the Civil Rights movement were arguing for was for the Federal Government and the several states to grant blacks access and freedom to the very same rights guaranteed to all citizens. Read the “I Have A Dream Speech” (again?) sometime. Note that what King says his dream is is born in the words of the Declaration and the Constitution. He does not make the case that African Americans be granted ~special~ rights or preferences, but rather the full use of the basic rights granted to all free citizens of this Republic. That is the central power of the speech — the clear moral case for equality in terms that all American understand are basic and “inalienable”.
Thus, for the analogy to Selma to hold, or have any genuine urgency, it does no good to point individual circumstances of prejudice or crimes. Rather it must be demonstrable and clear (again in terms of ~this~ analogy) that LGBT folks have been systematically denied the rights that the Constitution defines as inalienable and due to every free citizen.
Has the gay community been systematically denied those basic rights enumerated in the African American struggle for Civil Rights? The measurables say “no”. Homosexuals have never been ~as a class~ systematically denied the right to vote, freely assemble, run for elective office, drink from a common water fountain, stay in the same accommodations etc. And that only enumerates (some of) the issues African Americans were subject to during Jim Crow. It does not even touch upon the systematic, state sanctioned, horrors and injustices in the foisted on blacks as a class in precursor institution of chattel slavery. Therefore in my view and in the view, I suspect, of a majority of African Americans the “Selma analogy” is, at best, inapt.
Now, you ask — how ~should~ the question been litigated? I think the answer in terms of a “civil rights” remedy would have to begin with a finding by the Supreme Court that marriage to anyone one chooses of any gender is an “inalienable” or basic civil right.
I think that’s probably a steep climb and I think advocates of SSM know it. Why? Because the several states have in fact regulated the question of whom one can marry in ways we all know about. One cannot marry a close relative. One cannot marry more than a single spouse at one time. One cannot marry a minor without legal permission from a court or guardian etc. To my (admittedly limited) knowledge, this right of the states to regulate marriage in these ways has not been struck down.
So, to conclude. Kings powerful message appealed and was ultimately persuasive because he made the case in terms that almost no American familiar with the basic tenets of our founding (and those of basic human decency) could dispute. The basic demand or argument of “Selma” if you will is summed up thusly by King:
“In a sense we have come to our Nation’s Capital to cash a check. When the architects of our great republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every America was to fall heir.
This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed to the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice….”
So, in terms of this presentation of the “Selma argument” explain, if you will how, it is in any way apt or comparable with respect to LGBT folks as a class?
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