HAPPY FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES: After Marriage Equality Became a Nationwide Reality

Summary: The Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges has been a great victory for American queerfolk. I was happy for fifteen minutes.  Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David can now get hitched all across America. Of course, the reaction from cultural conservatives has been predictably sulfurous, while in the queer nation we are rapidly falling into all of those things that tend to steal our victories from us. Like Democrats, we often have difficulty opening the gifts we are given, and we have a long history of winning a war but losing the peace. There will be an awful lot of credit-taking by the Official LGBT Movement, many of whose members will muscle their way to the head of the chow line to bask in glory they did nothing to earn.

Oh, my ears and whiskers!

After waiting for months for the other shoe to drop, the Supreme Court finally announced is holding in Obergefell v. Hodges, 14-556, this morning. For us queerfolk who had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, it’s a moment, and a moment only, for great celebration.  I was happy for fifteen minutes.

I will leave for the labors of more astute legal analysts than I any significant analysis of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, in which he swung for the fences and hit it out of the park. But I will note that Roberts, C.J., Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, JJ, all dissented separately. Now, four separate dissents tends to undercut the power of the minority’s expression of views, and, moreover, in this case, each of the four dissents comes across less as a principled articulation of an individual jurist’s reservations or concerns about the majority view and more as a petulant statement of anger at a result the Justices in the minority knew going in that they were powerless to avert.

Indeed, only Chief Justice John Roberts’s dissent makes even the slightest effort to come across as a principled document, yet by urging what amounts to “civil disobedience” or “massive resistance” it comes close to tracking some of the more unhinged Republican advance denunciations of the majority opinion. Worse, by comparing the majority opinion to Dred Scott, Roberts impliedly equates the liberty of same-sex couples to exercise the “fundamental right” of marriage with the Peculiar Institution of Chattel Slavery. What an insult to queerfolk everywhere! That somehow my faculty to marry is the equivalent of holding African-Americans in bondage just doesn’t, and will never, compute with me.

Of course, if Roberts’ dissent was subject to its own enormities, the dissents from Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, JJ, came across as little more than foot stamping, fist-clenched arm waving. Scalia’s dissent in particular, while written in his usual pungent style, gave the impression of an epistolary temper tantrum, not a reasoned, carefully crafted dissent.

Yet, for all the sound and the fury from the four Republican Justices on the Irreconcilable Wing of the court, their anger comes across as positively reasonable compared to the almost unhinged screeds coming from the Republican side of the aisle. Predictably, presidential hopefuls of the Elephant persuasion have been carrying on, among other things, about the importance of a constitutional amendment to keep queerfolk from marrying one another, or about how Obergefell represents the death of Christian civilization. Not only are there emanations predictable, but they are, as usual, calculated to make Republicans look cartoonishly evil on this issue. Indeed, given the official reaction of the Republican Party and its fellow travelers, one may again ask why on earth any queer person would ever be a Republican?

Even so, Republicans know, far better than the Democrats, how to create and prosecute a culture war. Already, Republicans are claiming that Obergefell is this generation’s Roe v. Wade, as if the idea that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David tying the knot was tantamount to abortion. The conflation of the so-called pro-life movement with the anti-LGBT movement is predictable from a political standpoint, but still defies logic. If, in the rhetoric of the so-called pro-life movement, “abortion stills a beating heart,” then how can it possibly be equivalent to a marriage in which “two hearts beat as one”?

Still, cultural conservatives will deploy every forensically impoverished device they can in the service of a new and orders of magnitude more bitter culture war. Perhaps one upside (beyond the enormous upside of nationwide marriage equality) to the reaction from the cultural right will be the cultural right will have no option but to stop trying to lie to us that they are simply “concerned” about “redefining” marriage, and finally admit to us that is not our marriages they hate; it’s us they hate, with the white heat of a nova. It’s us they hate and want to see dead.

Yet even if the cultural right would like to compass are vanishing under color of whatever scriptural verse they cherry pick out of Leviticus, we queerfolk will still become foolish and complacent as a result of this decision. Even though “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, remains to be done before we can even begin to think of ourselves as first-class citizens, we will be largely content over this pride weekend to prance about in our Speedos, drink our pastel cocktails, ogle one another, and generally dance on the slopes of a volcano about to erupt. 

 I’m reminded of the scene from the movie Midway in which Henry Fonda, as Adm. Chester Nimitz, is responding to the news that three of four Japanese carriers were burning or had been sunk. “I’d call that a great victory,” said Hal Holbrook as Cmdr. Joe Rochefort. “Trouble is, Joe,” Fonda as Nimitz replied, “I want that fourth carrier.” Will we be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier? I don’t think we will.

I don’t think we will be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier because the mavens, movers, and shakers of our so-called Movement will soon fall to fighting over who the victory belongs to. They’ll soon fall to fighting over who is entitled to take possession of the kudos, and over who can be written out of the history. Now should be a time for careful, considerate strategizing about next steps and lessons learned.

However, in the words of sometime Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, “victory knows a thousand fathers.” And each of those thousand wannabe parents will be more busy fighting to have a paternity test done that on wondering what to do as our enemies gather and plan to compass our doom. For we always seem to have these arguments when we win a fight: whose baby is victory? But if we lose something, defeat, as Galeazzo Ciano warned “is an orphan.” And so, while we wait for the results of the paternity tests on our victory, that metaphorical fourth carrier is still out there and it can still do wicked damage.

My doubts as to our ability to get it together in the wake of a great victory are not simply the opinionating of a grouchy, middle-aged contrarian. They are the doubts of somebody who has been written out of the history. They are the doubts of the attorney who took on one of the first marriage cases in California, back in 1993, when marriage wasn’t a mainstream issue. Back then, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with whatever issue was considered mainstream was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time. Both my clients and I bore many slings and arrows from the Official Movement.

So, today, the Official Movement, and the people who make it up, the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-lately-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and — let’s shame the devil and tell the truth — the star fuckers, will celebrate. People will step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.

People in the Official Movement will engage in an orgy of self-congratulation, some rhetoric will be dished out to a couple of hundred people, and then, as the sun moves behind Mount San Jacinto, the crowd will disperse to the local homosexual bars, and in 48 hours the euphoria will be gone, and the community will be back to its usual bickering, gossiping, and backbiting.

Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when an Official Movement muscles its way to the head of the chow line.  So, while I was happy for 15 minutes, it’s now back to normal, and I see nothing to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed and how it was won.

BERNIE SANDERS’ WOMAN PROBLEM

Summary: There is an awful lot to love about Bernie Sanders. He’s a fearless warrior for America’s middle class, and it’s hard not to admire his fire, his passion, and his conviction. But Bernie has an emerging woman problem. In a time when social media have increasingly redefined the way in which American political messaging is done, the messaging that’s coming out of the Sanders campaign from supporters of Bernie Sanders on such social media as Facebook seems dated and sexist. Blaming Hillary for everything they object to about Bill’s record as President tends to reinforce the emergent feminist critique of the Sanders campaign is out of touch and disturbingly willing to traffic in sexist, anti-feminist, or even misogynist messaging. If Bernie Sanders develops a woman problem, a lot of women voters will develop a Bernie problem, and those pissed off, kissed off women voters may very well rally in large numbers to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I adore Bernie Sanders.

I admire the way he bears fearless, tribunician witness against the immiseration of the middle class by the greediest 1% among us.

I admire Bernie’s ideas, I admire his fire, and I admire his conviction.

What I don’t admire are Bernie’s supporters, who I think are going to do him some fairly serious damage.

In an emergent politics that depends heavily on social media, the downside of such social media is that it becomes possible to dig deep into the views of a particular candidate’s supporters. It becomes easy for opponents to find in the indiscreet utterances of a given candidate’s supporters a great deal of ammunition to use against the candidate. Any political consultant can tell you that Facebook is a very good place to undertake opposition research.

I’m not sure Bernie Sanders actually understands the danger to his campaign that some of his supporters represent.

Now let’s shame the devil and tell the truth, though the Democratic 2016 primary campaign has been tightening, Hillary Rodham Clinton still remains the prohibitive front runner, polling well ahead of the independent Vermont senator. This means that Bernie has something of an uphill battle before him. Moreover, truth be told, Bernie Sanders’ candidacy for the presidency of the United States is still a long shot, no matter how enthusiastic many of his supporters may be.

Unfortunately, it’s a virtual truism in partisan politics, particularly Democratic partisan politics, that supporters of longshot candidates tend to let their frustration with their own candidate’s longshot status get the better of them. On social media, the tone of the great majority of comments from Sanders supporters has been strongly negative and strongly cynical toward Sec. Clinton.

Indeed, reading some of the pro-Sanders comments on social media leads one to the conclusion that if Hillary Rodham Clinton were to walk across the waters of Washington’s Tidal Basin, Bernie Sanders’ supporters would flay her for being unable to swim. Moreover, Sec. Clinton’s often expressed support for marriage equality tends to be dismissed by the Sanders people as mere political pandering, unworthy of any consideration whatsoever.

This leaves the Sanders campaign open to charges of living down to Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

But as much as the Sanders campaign can probably get past charges of cynicism, it may have a harder time getting past the incipient feminist critique of his White House effort that it is trafficking in sexism, anti-feminism, and even misogyny.

It’s not hard to find evidentiary support for that emergent feminist critique of Bernie’s campaign. Many Sanders supporters have embraced a fairly common comment trope, belaboring Mrs. Clinton for the political record of her husband, President Clinton. To evaluate a woman, even a married woman, on the record of a man, even her husband, denies that woman’s independent existence and personhood. It denies that woman’s agency and postulates that such a woman is nothing more than a shadow or alter ego of some man.

You don’t have to be steeped in the works of Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, or Betty Friedan to know that such a view is, indeed, sexist, anti-feminist, and even misogynist. Simply put, a lot of Bernie’s campaign supporters (even the women among them) are pissing off a lot of uncommitted Democratic women by coming across as sexist, and the voter you piss off is a voter you can kiss off. If you’re a politician and your followers insult me, don’t be looking for my vote.

To the extent that Bernie Sanders’s campaign manages to piss off women voters and becomes tarred with the brush of misogyny, Sen. Sanders can kiss goodbye to his hopes of moving into the residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW in January, 2017. Simply put, Bernie needs to reach out to women in far larger numbers than he has been able to do thus far. No Democrat can hope to win the White House who does not make huge, even majority inroads into a base made up of women voters.

The numbers history of Bill Clinton’s two successful presidential campaigns and that of Barack Obama’s two victorious runs demonstrate clearly how important the gender gap is for Democrats in a presidential election. If the word gets out that Bernie Sanders has a woman problem, or that Bernie is not keeping some of his more vocal, more apparently sexist supporters in line, then Bernie Sanders will indeed have a problem with women voters.

And if Bernie has a woman problem in his campaign, women may very well wind up having a Bernie Sanders problem and making the choice to rally to Hillary Rodham Clinton.