The Change We Want to See in the World

Donald Sensing reminds us that our governmental problem isn't just that the judiciary is grabbing power, but also that legislatures are willingly handing it over:

What's in it for the legislators or Senators? By applying political, rather than jurisprudential litmus tests to appointees, the elected legislators get to pass the buck for the political agendas off to unelected judges, using them as shields to hide behind when facing the voters. Knowing that major elements of such agendas would never pass the people's muster, politicizing the appointment process has enabled the legislatures to legislate through the judiciary rather than enactments.

In so doing, the people are shunted aside. The power to make the most major decisions affecting the order of society are taken from their hands by subterfuge. Increasingly, our votes at the ballot have less and less effect on what happens in government - and thus, what happens to us.

Frankly, I find the outlook bleak. Reclaiming the government is going to require sustained exertion of political will by large numbers of people. And I'm not sanguine about the chances of accomplishing that. The class that is pushing the change knows its game; usurpation is dressed up as new freedom; changes will be gradual, best-face-forward affairs. There probably won't be a notable leap into totalitarianism, as the Left claims to fear so much from the Patriot Act.

More likely, if the trend can't be reversed or diverted, what we'll see is the steady march of emotionally satisfying, but socially destructive, innovations couched in the terms of moral superiority, followed by invasive and ineffective strategies for handling the damage that results. Living in such a way as to feed superficial appetites with wonders of quick gratification will be facilitated, while life in pursuit of deeper satisfaction and larger meaning, with an emphasis on rational thought and mature policy, will be presented with obstacles and disincentives.

In a way, the gay marriage debate offers, at the very least, a test case. The changes are sought on behalf of a group that is relatively privileged, and whose defining behaviors accord with the elite worldview. Homosexuals are not a minority group with an intergenerational memory, inasmuch as any adverse conditions aren't handed down from gay parent to gay child, in the pattern that digs racial, ethnic, and religious minorities into further squalor. And Andrew Sullivan enunciates the dramatist's lingo with perfection:

Instead of begging for the basic right to marry, gay couples are now demanding it. In San Francisco, they are simply getting married as an act of civil disobedience. And that is also happening across the country. This will alter the debate - as will the actual existence of marriages in Massachusetts in May. The debate will become how to tear gay couples apart, how to demean and marginalize them, rather than an abstract debate about theories of marriage. And as these couples begin to feel what marriage is like, as they experience what civil equality actually is, they will become emboldened. Just as those who refused to leave segregated lunch-counters began to deepen their sense of moral outrage and conviction, so the act of getting married - something heterosexuals simply assume they have - is empowering. When Massachusetts becomes the first free state for gay citizens, the movement will explode. I predict thousands of couples from all over the country and the world will arrive to claim their dignity and rights - and this experience will help transform the argument. I've always believed that if we could get every gay man and lesbian to fully internalize their own equality, to get past the brutalization that society has wrought upon their souls, nothing could stop us from achieving our dream.

Powerful, if overwrought, language, to be sure. But look at what lies beneath it. This tiny minority is simply going to force sweeping social change. There is no plea. There is no appeal to the goodwill of the majority, nor promise of magnanimity. There is no "long federal debate," as Sullivan has so often claimed to value. All arguments on behalf of the long-honed and proven institution of traditional marriage are cast aside as "an abstract debate about theories of marriage." There is, instead, emboldenment. There are declarations that, "when the religious right try to strip us of those marriages, and force us back into second-class status, then we will see something else: resistance." And then? The eye turns toward the institutions of that dreaded "religious right" that still refuse to grant their approval, all in the name of rights and equality.

But this is an insult to the civil rights movements — the "civil disobedience" — that went before. If this is to be equated with courageous blacks sitting at segregated lunch counters, then let's fill out the analogy. In this scenario, the mayor is serving the lunches, and there is no risk to shouting down those who oppose. The power of the media, of the elite, of the university, of the newly enthroned judiciary, and of unelected international bureaucracies is all behind the movement. Saddest of all, the moral power claimed through the sweat and blood of truly oppressed minority groups — the language of freedom made forceful through the humanity of a people clawing their way from slavery and segregation — is being snatched.

In the comments to his post, Rev. Sensing protests that his central concern is the activism of the judiciary, not the issue of gay marriage, itself. But the two cannot so easily be teased apart in the form in which they've entered the political scene. The crisis facing our nation at this point in history lays out for us to see the full range of the problem — down from an internationalist order that seeks to consolidate global power, through a federal and state system in which too many feel that the right to vote is worth about as much as the right to change the channel, through the full range of cultural institutions in which diversity of skin has been made a distraction from the homogeneity of thinking, right on through to individuals who are not satisfied that their rights allow "begging" for redefinition of the basic structural unit of society.

They will not beg? They will not even ask!

It may be that I'm making too much of this. Perhaps the combination of my long involvement in the debate and adverse geographical location is leading me to lose the necessary perspective. Surely the debate will change again when other states with stronger bars to gay marriage and citizens who do not share my region's apathy are dragged into the battle.

But I'm just beginning to piece together the enormity of this moment. A nation that has only just begun to awaken from a decades-long fantasy is being called upon to fight for its very foundation. To take the lead in doing so.

We'll see.

Posted by Justin Katz at February 16, 2004 9:19 AM
Culture