SmartRemarks

I’ve been preoccupied with other affairs lately, and haven’t been much inclined to write blog entries, as the date stamp will attest. However, sometimes events crop up in ways that just demand to be shared and commented upon.

Two news stories this week converged (at least in my mind) to compel the question:  just how do we allow so many deluded, deranged, venally twisted cretins to have power over us in public office? How do they get that way, and how can they stand to look at themselves in the mirror?

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On June 12, even as the election in Iran was happening and sweeping everything else out of the news cycle (a subject on which much digital ink has been spilled, to which I have nothing to add except that it’s nice to see a population care enough about democracy to take to the streets over it; that Obama has been responding to the situation with admirable discretion; and that the conservatives criticizing him are idiots who understand nothing about public diplomacy and would probably still attack him if he released a statement celebrating motherhood and apple pie)… the Obama administration did something unfortunate that produced an incensed reaction from observers in the civil liberties and GLBT communities.

Namely, the Department of Justice submitted a legal motion [pdf] putting this administration on the record defending the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, and arguing to dismiss Smelt v. United States, the first same-sex-marriage related case to reach the federal courts.

This isn’t about the merits of equal marriage per se (which Obama has long been on the record as opposing, unfortunately). It’s a challenge to the validity of DOMA, under which the federal government (and other states) are not obliged to recognize same-sex marriages that are legally constituted in states that allow them (as is the case with these plaintiffs)—never mind that pesky “full faith and credit” clause, among other Constitutional provisions. It is, in short, a law that formally enshrines discrimination.

It was a bad law when Bill Clinton signed it, and it’s a worse one today now that the situation it contemplates is not merely hypothetical. And it’s a law that candidate Obama loudly opposed.

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When people look back years from now, they may well mark spring of 2009 as the point when America really changed its attitude toward same-sex marriage. Call it “gay marriage,” call it what you will—I prefer the simple descriptive term “equal marriage”—it seems clear that we’ve passed a tipping point.

At the start of this year, equal marriage laws were on the books in only one state:  trailblazer Massachusetts. Since then the list has grown to include Connecticut (following through on a court order from last year), Iowa (also in response to the state’s high court), then Vermont and Maine and (as of this week) New Hampshire, in each case enacted not by court order but voluntarily by the state legislatures. Meanwhile there are bills working their way through the legislatures of New York and Pennsylvania. On the next tier down, three states (New Jersey, Washington, and Oregon) recognize same-sex civil unions, and Washington, D.C. has recently joined Nevada and California in recognizing slightly more nebulous “domestic partnerships.”

There are still setbacks—notably California’s regrettable Proposition 8, which passed last November and was upheld (on very narrow grounds) by the California Supreme Court—but compared to just five years ago, when the issue seemed like a sure-thing hot-button winner for right-wingers across the country in the 2004 election cycle, the change has been remarkable to behold.

It stuns me to realize, given that I used to work for a GLBT-rights organization, that I haven’t written about this topic before. Then again, perhaps that’s because in the circles I move in, it’s just not a controversial issue. Everyone understands that equal marriage is quite simply the right thing to do, and that those who oppose it are either trogolodytes or politicians trying to appeal to troglodytes. (And yes, this issue is another one of Obama’s shortcomings.) There is, quite simply, no remotely plausible argument against it. 

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