Puritan Bigotry Resurgent? And, What's in a Word? The legislature of the State of Massachusetts, in a confused melee of irresponsibility, voted yesterday to submit to the voters a measure to ban gay marriage. Don't be misled. The great majority of the 200-member legislature opposed such a submission, but under state law, only 60 votes are needed to send a measure to referendum at general election.
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First 61 voted for it. Then the legislature voted to reconsider that vote. Then 61 voted for it again! If the legislature does the same thing next session, the electorate gets the issue in 2008. Will the voters of Massachusetts vote to undo a huge advance for human rights that made Massachusetts a model for the Nation? Maybe not. Same-sex marriage has been legal in Massachusetts since 2004. 8,000 couples have married. Massachusetts has not been plunged into the sea — which, remember, is right nearby — nor have fire and brimstone rained down upon Boston, Springfield — or Salem.

From June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging. Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft; dozens languished in jail for months without trials until the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts subsided.

Ah, makes you proud, doesn't it? The good old days. That's the kind of tradition we should honor and revive! That's what conservatism is all about, right?
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No, actually that's completely wrong. The Puritans, who founded my city (Newark, NJ), not just Massachusetts, were monsters of intolerance of whom all decent Americans are properly ashamed. They left England to escape intolerance, then promptly established 'reverse intolerance' in "New England", intruding the bigotries of the Old World into the New. That was the British era, a time when what is now the United States was divided among various European and native sovereignties. My people, the Dutch, controlled much of what is now New York and New Jersey, and established here a tolerant, even indulgent civilization ("New Netherland", with its capital, "New Amsterdam") whose character even today reflects that early influence. Sweden occupied parts of Delaware, Pennsylvania, and, again, New Jersey, in its colony of "New Sweden". "New Spain" controlled large parts of our present Southwest and all of Florida. "New France" occupied much of our midsection. And of course there were some 600 Amerindian "nations" throughout.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)['] responsibility is the administration and management of 55.7 million acres of land [87,031 square miles, slitely larger than the State of Minnesota] held in trust by the United States for American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives. There are 561 federal recognized tribal governments in the United States.

Tho it is common today to discount all these other elements of our past but the British colonies, and to see ourselves as so changed from those origins that they don't count, the reality is that in some measure the past livs on in each of the many places that comprise the Nation. Thus, the impulse to impose conformity that produced ducking and the pillory in British Massachusetts is still present in American Massachusetts, and every now and then pokes its ugly head up to cause trouble.
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The Puritans among us are on the defensive, as the American Revolution continues to make progress, against dogged resistance, toward a society in which everyone is indeed entitled to "the Pursuit of Happiness". But they have apparently concluded that their best defense is a good offense, and they see in gay "marriage" a chance to win back lost ground.
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They cannot hope to triumph in their extreme program, as to hang "faggots" or burn them at the stake. No, they have to pose as moderates, simple "traditionalists" who wish to preserve some modicum of respect for the past into the future. They do not demand that gay couples be denied the same rights as straights. All they ask — and it's so moderate, so little to ask, isn't it? — is that the word "marriage" be reserved to the legal union of one man with one woman. (Of course, it's not just one word but every related word, like "matrimony" and "matrimonial", "husband" and "wife".) Is that too much to ask?
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Yes, it is.
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In the United States, we must often pose issues in racial terms to make things clear. Our struggle with questions of equality must always be seen thru the prism of race. So let's view the "marriage" issue thru that prism.
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Would blacks, Orientals, and people of mixed blood consent to be given absolute legal equality in every way but one: the word "human" is reserved to whites? "You can call yourselves 'people', 'persons' — anything you like except 'human'."
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Would reserving the word "human" (and related words like "humanity", "humankind" and "humane") to whites alone be merely a moderate, sensible, reasonable doffing of the cap to tradition? Or would it be an act of unspeakable bigotry? You decide.
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Mitt Romney, a 'moderate'-conservative Republican who somehow managed to be elected Governor of Massachusetts and now dares to aspire to be President, is leading the charge to strip gay unions of the word "marriage". He is a contemptible piece of garbage who should be charged openly with the concealed bigotry of which he is eminently guilty.
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Would any legislature, any governor, in any state, work to remove the word "human" from blacks, Orientals, or people of mixed race? Or would they be so afraid of being killed by militants with guns or mobs with ropes that they would never dare such an act of open bigotry?
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Homosexuality is ennobling. Gay men are for the most part profoundly nonviolent, and our movement for respect and equality in society has been marked by anger only against property, in the Stonewall Riots and a very few other such incidents of small scale. Perhaps that's the problem. If we got out guns and threatened to shoot Mitt Romney thru the heart — tho one would have to be a really good shot to hit such a tiny target — would Romney stand courageously for "tradition"? Or would he shut the hell up and let progress extend the benefits of our Revolution to all?
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I do not for an instant think that that little nothing Mitt Romney has so much courage in his convictions as to risk death for them. Nor has any of the other bigots in the Massachusetts legislature who voted to send this issue to the electorate. They're just bullies, picking on people who don't fite back with the only force Republicans respect: (para)military force. But when you give people something and then snatch it away, can you really expect them to accept that humiliation without violence?
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"Traditionalists" really do believe that they can do anything to gay men and get away with it. Not one of the 61 bigots in Massachusetts would have voted for a ballot measure if they believed for an instant that gay men would wait for them outside their house in the dead of nite and shoot them dead thru a window.
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Fear of violence has been a prime element in the U.S. handling of the race issue. In the 60s, someone (H. Rapp Brown?), scared the sh*t out of moderate white Americans in saying, all too ritely, "Violence is as American as apple pie." Large swaths of our major cities (including mine, but not even nearly uniquely) have been burned to the ground in race riots, with substantial loss of life.
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We like to pretend that it is the nonviolent tactics of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the rest of the mainstream civil-rights leaders that produced the Nation's racial progress. But the appeal to our best instincts was never more than the carrot. The stick was fear, deep-seated, stark fear that if we did not do justice to blacks, we would have mass death and destruction all over the Nation.
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There is no such fear of gay men (nor lesbian women). That's why appeals to our best instincts have achieved so little after many decades of activism. Tho most people think the gay-rights movement dates back only to the Stonewall Riots, those riots could not have produced change had it not been for the preexistence of the Mattachine Society and other pre-Stonewall organizations, which were ready to step into a temporary outburst of rage and create it into a newly energized movement.
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Gay-rights movements date back to before 1860 in Europe and around 1945, 62 years ago, in the United States. The Stonewall Riots in June 1969 were nearly 38 years ago! The progress we made in making society aware of gay people (not least with my coinage, "Gay Pride" as it is used now) has been much too slow for those of us who have had to wait, but seems much too fast to those who don't want any progress at all toward removing the special, privileged status of heterosexuality. Many of my peers in the Movement of the 60s, especially the older ones then, are dead now, having died without full rights despite decades of struggle. I'm 62 and have never had full rights in a society that aspires to "Liberty and justice for all". How much longer can I wait? How much longer do I have, to wait?
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Doesn't any gay man in Massachusetts own a gun?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is ,3004 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:04 PM