A shameful act
Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13-1 to advance a proposed amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. The committee at least removed language that also would have banned civil unions between gay people, an action which enraged religious extremists and their Republican supporters. The bill must still pass the Senate, be reconciled with the House version (which would ban civil unions), and then be passed again by both houses of the General Assembly next year before it can go to the voters the year after that. In other words, it can still be stopped. Thankfully, it is far harder to enact an amendment to the state constitution here than it is in California.
While I don't excuse any of the votes for this ugly bit of discrimination, the Democrats on the committee ought to hang their heads in shame for surrendering to the rightwing pogrom against homosexuals. Gays are to American rightwing religious extremists as Jews were to the Nazis: a group to be villifed as outside the "normal" bounds of civil society, a group to blame for everything, a group entitled to no civil rights. If you mentally substitute "Jew" for "homosexual" in the rightwing hate speech against gay people, you are often left with something that could have come from the typewriters of the most vile Nazi propagandists of the early 20th century. Did we learn nothing?
The effort by some state Republicans to also ban gay civil unions, or "marriage lite," is particularly ugly. Among other things, such a ban would deprive lifelong gay partners of the right to be in their partner's hospital room when they are sick or dying. And to what end? When small towns across Pennsylvania are dying economically because they are isolated in mountain valleys at the end of two-lane roads, and can find no place in the 21st century economy, why is the Legislature wasting time on this?
I understand the discomfort many straight Americans have with homosexuality. I used to be among their number, still am in some ways: I found an excuse to leave the room a couple of times while watching "Brokeback Mountain" last week on DVD. I grew up in a small Midwestern town in the 1960s, a period when gays were firmly in the closet. I couldn't tell you a single person in my high school class of 400 who was gay, although there had to be some, since being gay is as much a biological roll of the dice as having blue eyes. Over the years, as I got to know gay people, my prejudice went away.
The campaign to ban gay marriage is a political campaign disguised as morality. State gay marriage referendums were used as a tool in the 2004 Presidential election to turn out religious conservative voters for the Bush-Cheney ticket. It worked, too. But I believe much of the public is catching on, and the campaign against gays is losing some of its effectiveness. That's part of the reason for the right's campaign against immigrants this year. Anything to distract conservative voters from the utter failure of the Bush Administration.