By:
Paul S. Marchand
Thanks to our friends at “The FAMiLY (sic) Leader,” a so-called public advocacy organization “affiliated with the Iowa Family Policy Center,” a right-wing political organization, the answer to the vexing question of who is to blame for all of America’s ills
has finally been definitively answered.
It’s ... wait for it... gay men with crabs!
At least that’s the implicit finding of the so-called FAMiLY Leader’s “Marriage Vow,” billed as a “declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY,” a vow Republican presidential hopefuls are being called on to sign, and
which has already been signed by Michelle Bachman and Rick Santorum.
According to the orthographically challenged culture warriors at the “FAMiLY Leader,
” gay men, diseased pariahs all, (to the FAMiLY Leader types at least) are responsible for the breakdown of the American family, the introduction of sharia law, the national debt, heterosexual divorce, the over- and misuse of the American armed forces, and apparently a great deal of religious agita and angst.
The Marriage Vow, and the series of endnotes that accompany it, would be funny if it weren’t so damn serious. Its arguments defy any form of logic known to humankind, and trying to refute them is
like trying to hold quicksilver in the palm of one’s hand.
To the extent that one can form some sort of logical argument from reading the so-called Marriage Vow, it appears to be that
only straight married people make any contribution to American society; uppity queers wanting to get married cause straight marriages to fail; straight marriages failing is the source of all of America’s problems, therefore everything wrong with America is the fault of queer people.
To support this argument, the Iowa culture warriors appeal to the classic totalitarian logic of trying to force those with whom they disagree to prove a negative, as well as by framing their arguments in such a way as to make any counter argument seem utterly nonsensical.
It would be funny, if it weren’t so damn serious.
For the so-called Marriage Vow is really nothing more and nothing less than a
ringing attack upon the very idea that LGBT people should even be allowed to exist, let alone enjoy any kind of rights of first-class citizenship within the Commonwealth. In reading the various well-debunked, junk science claims put forth in the endnotes to the so-called Marriage Vow, one can detect the same kind of deliberate lies and propaganda that were contained in the infamous
Protocols of Zion, that notorious anti-Semitic forgery produced by the Okhrana, the secret police of Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II.
While it may be amusing to read, way down in the bowels of endnote 8, an invocatio
n of gay men getting crabs as apparently constituting some sort of justification for withholding from LGBT people the right to marry, any argument which depends for its force upon the setting forth of a litany of diseases or ailments which LGBT people supposedly suffer more than do straight people is essentially one which says in effect
“diseased pariahs have no rights.”
Unfortunately for the Iowa Culture Warriors, the Diseased Pariah argument can cut in a whole variety of ways. Obese straight people are far more likely than slim homosexuals to suffer from diabetes and heart disease, yet I am aware of
no argument that any responsible political hopeful would ever make that fat people with diabetes and heart disease
should be read with bell, book, and candle out of the Body Politic, any more than I am aware of any responsible argument for the exclusion of cigarette smokers or anorexics on any similar ground, notwithstanding the fact that from a health perspective a strong argument could be made that obesity is a voluntary condition, in the same way that cigarette smoking and anorexia nervosa are voluntary.
More disturbing even than the so-called Marriage Vow’s junk science and the phony claims advanced to support such junk science is the blithe claim in Endnote 1 that “[s]ociological data squares with tradition to argue that self-centered adult egos and agendas in American families must be subordinated to the long-term interests of America‟s children.” When parsed out ---
not even to its logical extreme, but merely to a degree of reasonable foreseeability --- Endnote 1 essentially argues for the suppression of any civil liberty or freedom of expression that does not coincide with the regressive social views set forth in the so-called Marriage Vow.
Who decides, after all, what are the so-called long-term interests of America’s children? In his book
Parliament of Whores, Republican humorist P.J. O’Rourke once observed in sum and substance that we would happily chuck all the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution in order to find the missing kids on the side of the milk carton. When Pres. Bill Clinton was caught out in what was --- when all was said and done --- a rather low-level peccadillo with Monica Lewinsky, our own Republican Congresswoman Mary Whitaker Bono Baxley McGillicuddy,
metaphorically wrung her hands and theatrically demanded to know “what do we tell the children?”
What many parents told their children was probably similar to a number of my straight friends told their children at the time: that human beings are sexual creatures and that
sometimes good people make bad mistakes. Along with that sound teaching, I also know that many parents of my acquaintance used the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal to make the point that
with adult privileges -- including the privilege of sexual expression -- come adult responsibilities, a lesson that the so-called Marriage Vow culture warriors would deliberately ignore in order not nearly to infantilize future generations, but also
to restore in their fullest form a 19th century series of misogynistic, racist, and heteronormative dispensations.
So, as much as I may laugh at the crude superficiality of an argument that, for comedic purposes can be lampooned by blaming America’s ills on gay men with crabs,
a more serious and searching reading of the so-called Marriage Vow leaves me deeply angry and not a little bit frightened. The fright is easy to understand; anyone who is a member of a targeted minority that has routinely been blamed for every manner of social ill necessarily becomes a little concerned when aspiring right-wing politicians seek to create wedge issues by defining oneself and others similarly situated as
a dangerous and diseased Other of whom society would be well rid.
What angers me, and I expect what angers so many LGBT people, is that such atavistic appeals should even be listened to in the 21st century. Let me be clear;
I am tired, as I approach my 50th year, of being told that my right of first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth can be and should be curtailed in order to assuage the religious discomfort of any particular sectarian adherent.
Moreover, anyone who claims that my possession, in the abstract, of the right to form a civil contract of marriage with another man, somehow demeans his or her straight marriage,
is either grossly insecure or lying. Either way, my basic right to a fundamental incident of first-class citizenship should never be dependent either upon handholding someone else’s insecurity, or upon tolerating a gross lie.
The so-called Marriage Vow offends me, therefore, on four counts.
First, the so-called Marriage Vow offends me because of its clear implication that all of America’s ills can be laid at the door of queer people like me. If America is facing real challenges in the 21st century it’s not because queer people have dared to assert the right to be out within the body politic; correlation is not causation, and the routine conflation by the religious right of the two is a totalitarian tactic worthy of Josef Goebbels and the Third Reich propaganda machine he led.
Second, the so-called marriage vow offends me because of its routine use of debunked junk science and its
ad infirmam argument that because LGBT people may suffer from this or that ailment in proportionally greater numbers than our percentage in the general population, we are somehow
too sick, too infirm, or too diseased to be allowed a place at the table in American society.
Third, while
I make no bones about being a confirmed, communicating, believing Christian of the Episcopal Church, I object to the routine injection of Scripture -- and, specifically, personal and often highly tendentious interpretations of Scripture -- into what ought to be religiously neutral, indeed, secular, discussions of public policy. Any time a policy is formulated that depends upon the specific denominational interpretation of a passage of Scripture, such policy
ipso facto violates the First Amendment prohibition against an establishment of religion.
By invoking the book of Genesis, the so-called Marriage Vow directly seeks to draw any signer into a
prima facie violation of his or her oath to protect and defend the United States Constitution;
you cannot subscribe to a so-called vow that is based in part upon the book of Genesis without contravening your constitutional oath. As a member of the Maryland House of Delegates once put it, “I don’t put my hand on a copy of the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible,
I put my hand on the copy of the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution.”
Finally, as alluded to above, I object to any attempt to use the free exercise clause of the First Amendmen
t as a sword by which any particular religious denomination may seek to impose its particular denominational or traditional orthopraxy upon society as a whole, particularly given the fact that in America,
every single adherent of every single denomination of every single religious tradition, whether Abrahamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Shinto, Wiccan, pagan, or any other, is a member of a religious minority.
There is no single majority religious denomination or tradition in the United States, and any effort to impose the beliefs or practices of one particular denomination or tradition upon all others necessarily represents a tyranny of a particular privileged minority over everyone else.
The price every religious adherent in the United States pays for the free exercise of his or her religion is that he or she must be prepared to accept that
others may well exercise their faith in a way that is not only different but potentially discomfiting. Yet, when the Sound and the Fury are over, we must all -- as Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has put it ---
learn to be human alongside others.
Because the so-called Marriage Vow is such a tissue of lies, homophobia, and religious intolerance, it is a
perfect litmus test for who is and is not worthy to be President of the United States; no candidate whose name appears as a signatory of this hateful document
should ever be elected dog catcher, let alone President.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. Almost 20 years ago, he litigated one of the first marriage equality cases ever brought in California. The views contained herein are his own.
Comments will be strictly moderated. I’m not interested in, and won’t post, Bible citations, personal attacks, or claims that LGBT sexuality is “wrong,” “debased,” or “unnatural.” Comments from persons who are either known trolls or who appear to be paid employees of right-wing think tanks will not be approved for publication.
