Supreme Court Has Chance to Right Wrong Against Homosexuals
Salt Lake Tribune,
January 11, 2003
P.O. Box 867, Salt Lake City, UT 84110
Fax: 801-257-8950
Email: letters@sltrib.com
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/jan/01112003/commenta/commenta.asp
By Anna Quindlen, Universal Press Syndicate
Wedding announcements track American social history. Once they were the
purview of the well-to-do, and the stereotypical division of roles was in the
published details: the groom’s work, the bride’s gown. Point d’esprit,
sweetheart neckline, Alencon lace: How quaint it all seems.
In the blink of an eye, historically speaking, the dress disappeared and in
its place was a working woman, sometimes one who was keeping her own name. The
idealized gave way to the real. A previous marriage had ended in divorce. The
ring bearer was the 5-year-old son of the bride and groom. And couples of all
classes, religions and races eventually smiled out from the pages of the daily
papers.
So it said something about how the world works today when newspapers began
to run announcements of the commitment ceremonies of gay men and lesbians.
Although about 10 percent of America’s dailies now do so, The New York Times
got the most mileage from the decision because of its position as the industry
gold standard. From the beginning it was just as the opponents feared: The
same-sex announcements read so much like the ones that surrounded them that
they came close to simply blending in, the union of one well-educated
documentary producer and psychotherapist reading much like another.
That the Times as recently as 50 years ago referred to gay men as
"deviants" in its pages and today is willing to report the joyous
union of Daniel Gross and Steven Goldstein is a reflection of the ways of the
world. Newspapers are essentially conservative in their internal decisions;
they do not make social policy, only reflect it once it moves convincingly
from the fringe into the mainstream.
The U.S. Supreme Court is not in the business of making social policy
either. Nor is its job to reflect it, only to interpret the law intelligently
without regard for popularity or prejudice. It conspicuously failed in this
mission in 1986 when the justices were asked to rule on the constitutionality
of state sodomy laws. From almost any legal promontory, their decision ought
to have been clear. Hark back to Griswold v. Connecticut and the right to
privacy in intimate affairs; use an equal-protection argument, given that law
enforcement has traditionally granted heteros a free pass on conduct that is
prosecuted among gay men and lesbians. But strike those statutes down.
Instead the court went the other way. As egregious as the decision was the
lack of real jurisprudence in the pamphleteering of the majority opinion,
which sounded as if it had been written by Cotton Mather during a particularly
dirty-minded phase of adolescence. Years later, Justice Lewis Powell, who
tipped the 5-4 balance, said he was sorry he had voted as he had.
So when the court announced recently that it would hear a Texas case that
considered the same issue, the announcement suggested that the justices, too,
saw the error of the earlier decision and might redress it. Every citizen who
cares about what America is supposed to stand for should be rooting for that
result.
The sodomy laws are part of a dark tradition in this nation; they do not
exist, and have never existed, to serve the public weal. They are meant only
to demonize and marginalize a class of human beings. In this, their closest
corollary is the now-reviled Jim Crow laws, which excluded black Americans
from hotels and restaurants and consigned them to separate schools and
restrooms, not because it served any civic purpose but because it was a way to
signal that black men and women were inferior. The sodomy laws may be the last
laws standing that exist purely for the purpose of codifying and justifying
bigotry.
The story of the Texas case the court is preparing to hear reveals just how
such statutes turn a free country into a police state. Two consenting male
adults were in the midst of a private act of sexual congress in the apartment
of one when the police burst in. The men were arrested, jailed overnight and
fined. The police showed up in the first place because of a tip by a neighbor
of a "weapons disturbance." The neighbor himself was later jailed,
convicted of filing a false report. He could be forgiven for thinking this
result unfair, since in his behavior he seems to have been merely mimicking
the government, monitoring private acts, targeting individuals on the basis of
sexual orientation.
This is simply not supposed to be a country in which the law is a flimsy
cover for punishing the unpopular. Nevertheless, America’s history has been
a history of doing just that, whether to immigrants, religious or racial
groups, and then eventually having to admit remorse and self-disgust. (See
"Trent Lott: The Apology Tour.")
There is an irony in the fact that when newspapers in some states are
printing the announcements of civil unions by gay men and lesbians, they are
also printing the names of sexual desperadoes, breaking the law in the name of
love. To resolve that peculiar dissonance does not require the high court to
bow to culture change but instead to return to its own defining principles of
fairness and freedom, to turn away from the prejudice that, last time out,
substituted prurience for jurisprudence.
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