Tip It!

Richard Socarides, an attorney and former advisor to the Clinton White House on gay and lesbian issues, wrote a fantastic piece on The Huffington Post yesterday which is must reading. His article, called "A Summer for Gay Rights", talks about the fact that he believes we're at a tipping point in this country where the federal courts finally appear willing to recognize and more aggressively enforce civil rights for gay and lesbian Americans much as they did for African Americans a generation ago.

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(richard socarides)

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Gay marriage advocates won a major victory in the recent Massachusetts ruling, (see our post by clicking on "Politics - Gay Marriage" in the Labels list at the right of this page), and the Prop 8 case currently being argued in California is expected to be another victory for the gay and marriage community, but as Socarides pointed out, this turning of the tide is getting some criticism from some unexpected sources.

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The Brookings Institution's Jonathan Rauch, a married gay man, wrote in the New York Times that it's bad policy for the courts to enforce such rights, and that instead the political process should bring about the needed changes, when the country is ready for it. And The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart wrote that the political environment of the country is not ready for full gay civil and marriage rights, and that the backlash against a court ruling guaranteeing such would set the gay-rights movement back by years, even decades. Wow.

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You must read Socarides entire article, it will really help to remind you of the bigger picture here, the one of which we're now going to remind Rauch and Capehart. So to Rauch and Capehart we say: Get real! From the very beginning of the founding of this country, our leaders realized that there would always be situations in which the majority would ride roughshod over the rights of the minority. That's why they set up Congress in the way that they did, so that the smaller states couldn't be bullied by the larger states, and that's exactly why they created a Supreme Court, to have a judicial body which would help to safeguard the rights of the minority, even when the overwhelming majority was not "ready for it". In every case of sweeping social reform, which the courts helped to bring about, the country was never "ready for it". We had to fight an incredibly bloody civil war to end slavery because the country wasn't ready for the end of slavery, and as Socarides points out, when the Supreme Court case of Loving vs. Virginia struck down the last of the state laws which banned interracial marriage, the Gallup Poll at the time found that 72% of Americans were opposed to interracial marriage.

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So we agree with Socarides that Rauch and Capehart should maybe open up a history book and read a little before they write any more such articles. Their recent articles show an appalling lack of understanding of not only history in general, but in particular, the history of the battles for various forms of civil rights. The overwhelming majority of Americans are currently opposed to gay marriage, but being in the majority doesn't make them right, and it most certainly is the job of our courts to strike down any laws which discriminate against a minority group of Americans, whether the country is "ready for it" or not.