Old Argument but with a New Target
Philadelphia
Inquirer, May 1, 2003
P.O. Box 8263, Philadelphia, PA 19101
Fax: 215-854-4483
Email: Inquirer.opinion@phillynews.com
By Jonathan Zimmerman
The Santorum flap won’t go away. Last week, Rick
Santorum made national headlines by supporting the Texas anti-sodomy law. This
week, gay-rights activists released a 2001 fund-raising raising letter in
which Santorum linked same-sex unions to terrorism. Like al-Qaeda hijackers,
Santorum suggested, gay sex and marriage threaten the very heart of our body
politic.
Although the White House has remained silent,
Congressional GOP members have mounted a vigorous defense of Santorum. On
Tuesday, Senate majority leader Bill Frist said Santorum—the third-ranking
Republican in the Senate—retained “the full, 100 percent confidence” of
his party. House majority leader Tom DeLay praised Santorum for “standing on
principle,” saying gay sex “undermines a lot of moral questions that we
have in this country.”
That’s what white Americans used to say about sexual
relations between different races. In 1929, police in Sheffield, Ala., burst
into the home of Elijah Fields, an African-American man. They found him in an
unlit bedroom with Ollie Roden, a white woman. Although Fields and Roden were
fully dressed, they were arrested under an Alabama law that made it illegal
for a white woman and a black man to marry or “live together in adultery or
fornication.”
A local jury convicted Fields, who was acquitted on
appeal for lack of evidence: He and Roden were not seen having sex. But the
courts never questioned whether the state could bar them from doing so. Like
interracial marriage, white Alabamians presumed, interracial sex was a
“crime against nature” and a sin against God.
The Fields-Roden episode is recounted in Interracial
Intimacies, a recent book by Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy. His book
should be required reading for Rick Santorum and any other American who wants
to prohibit gay sex and marriage. As Kennedy shows, every argument that we now
hear against gay unions was once used against interracial ones, once called
“miscegenation.”
The first argument against miscegenation invoked
America’s social order, which required a strict differentiation of the
races. “Shall America remain white?” one worried physician asked a medical
conference in 1924. Interracial unions foretold “race suicide,” the
eugenic nightmare that haunted white America well into the 1960s.
Santorum sees gay sex and marriage as a threat to our
social order, though to him this order rests upon “the family” rather than
on “the race.” If we abandon our taboos on gay sex, he claims, our
prohibitions against other perversions—including incest and polygamy—will
fall by the wayside.
But why? Incest clearly injures children, while polygamy
would raise a host of serious problems surrounding property rights, child
custody, and more. Gay sex—between consenting adults, remember—wouldn’t
change any of that.
The second argument against interracial relationships
rested on religion. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow,
Malay and red,” wrote a Virginia judge in 1965, upholding the state’s
so-called Racial Integrity Act. “The fact that he separated the races shows
that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
Turn on so-called Christian radio, and you’ll hear the
same thing about gay sex: It violates the will of the Lord. In a less
sectarian vein, Santorum simply deemed them unnatural: “In every society,
the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included
homosexuality,” he said. “It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog,
or whatever the case may be.”
Man on dog?
The Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial
marriages in 1967, so Elijah Fields and Ollie Roden would now be free to wed,
if they wished. But not John Lawrence and Tyron Garner, the two men involved
in the Supreme Court case testing the Texas anti-sodomy laws. They’re an
interracial couple, too: Lawrence is white, Garner black. But they’re gay,
so Rick Santorum doesn’t want them to get married. He doesn’t even want
them to have sex.
I’d ask how such opinions can gain the upper hand in a
free society—except that we already know. It’s happened before.
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