On April 3, 2009, the Iowa Supreme Courtstruck down the state statute banning same-sex marriage- just the third state to allow gay marriage, after Connecticut and Massachusetts (sorry, fickle California – but soon after, Vermont made it four – and the first to do so legislatively). Most striking about the Iowa vote is that it was unanimous - as strong a statement as the landmark 9-0 US Supreme Court decision 54 years years ago in Brown vs. Board of Education.
As the Iowa Court summarized:
We are firmly convinced the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective. The legislature has excluded a historically disfavored class of persons from a supremely important civil institution without a constitutionally sufficient justification. [emphasis added]
What strikes me in this measured passage is the mundane recognition that, however strongly some people may feel about this issue, there is simply no compelling reason for our government to take a stand to prevent two unrelated, unmarried adults from getting married to each other. It also reminds me just how clueless I am about homophobia. Not that I’m an expert on misogyny, racism and classism. I know these are layered, complex issues.
But I like to think I have at least a passing understanding of some of the systemic underpinnings of these misguided mechanisms of social control. These are after all all ways of 1) getting other people to do the things you don’t want to do by 2) controlling elements of society (including, with misogyny, intimate partners) for a variety of clear purposes – money, sex, subordination, and, as an added bonsus 3) feeling better about your own sorry self because you feel superior to a defined class of “others.”
But homophobia is not about feeling better because you are better than, for example, women, people of color, people who are less educated than you are. It is, rather, a means of social control to make people more like you, not less than you. What I really wonder is why anybody cares. It seems obvious that what people do in their bedrooms behind closed doors has no effect on you, on your life, whatsoever. So what is, after all, the big deal? As Jerry Seinfeld might say, what’s it to you if some schlub “plays for the other team”?
Of course, it is a big deal. The consequences of homophobia remain very real. Violence against GLBT folks is alive and, well, virulent. And suicide attempts for gay teenagers are about three times higher (or is it six?) than heterosexual teenagers. So to me it’s not so much a moral or religious or even an emotional issue, but a public health issue. A pretty damn big one.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that while the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends towards justice. It’s my hope that the Iowa decision is an important step in this process because, perhaps ironically, it celebrates sameness, not difference:
Like most Iowans, [the plaintiffs] are responsible,caring, and productive individuals. They maintain important jobs, or are retired, and are contributing, benevolent members of their communities. They include a nurse, business manager, insurance analyst, bank agent, stay-at-home parent, church organist and piano teacher, museum director, federal employee, social worker, teacher, and two retired teachers. Like many Iowans, some have children and others hope to have children. [By the way, Julie Shapiro's most excellent blog discusses how this opinion relates to parenting issues.]
The last fifty years have seen the widespread acceptance of Hannah Arendt’s theories on the “banality of evil” in her descriptions of holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann, followed by the grudging acceptance of the banality of virtue, in the documentary Weapons of the Spirit (whose Resistance members are largely uneducated, unthinking, French peasant Huguenots, who appear to pretty much stumble upon immensely heroic actions).
In other words, we may be more akin to monsters and heroes alike than we would like to think.
I wonder – if we can accept that both evil and virtue may be banal, perhaps we can also come to accept that sexual orientation is not only mundane, but that it’s not even an issue of moral virtue at all.
Maybe, eventually, we straight folk will figure out that the question of someone’s sexual orientation isn’t even a very interesting question.
