It was the Fourth of July, a typical warm muggy
summer day in Atlanta, Georgia. Not my favorite for running on hot pavement but
that’s exactly what I did, with thousands of others in the annual Peach Tree
Road Race. I’d come to participate in the Men and Masculinity Conference not
far away in Athens, Georgia and was taking in the local flavor-- in running
shoes.
The Conference was put on by the then named National
Organization for Changing Men, a group of educators, social scientists,
community activists and concerned citizens across gender, ethnicity and sexual
preference. It had a number of key initiatives designed to move our society
closer to it’s espoused values of liberty for all, one called The Campaign to End Homophobia. As part
of the conference participants commitment to doing more than just “talking
amongst ourselves,” we gathered at the Federal Building in Atlanta at the end
of our sweaty run to protest the Hardwick Decision in which the US Supreme
Court had upheld the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing
oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults when applied to
homosexuals.
As difficult as it may be for some living today to
believe the majority opinion was that the Constitution did not confer the right
of a particular group of people in America to engage in private sexual
practices, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger was the one to cite the “ancient
roots” of prohibitions against homosexual sex in his reference to William
Blackstone’s description of homosexual sex as an “infamous crime against
nature”, worse than rape, and “a crime not fit to be named.”
Author of the dissent Justice Harry Blackmun, framed
the issue as revolving around the right to privacy. Blackmun's dissent accused
the Court of an "almost obsessive focus on homosexual activity" and
an "overall refusal to consider the broad principles that have informed
our treatment of privacy in specific cases." In response to invocations of
religious taboos against homosexuality, Blackmun wrote: "That certain, but by no means all, religious groups condemn the
behavior at issue gives the State no license to impose their judgments on the
entire citizenry. The legitimacy of secular legislation depends, instead, on
whether the State can advance some justification for its law beyond its
conformity to religious doctrine." Seventeen years after Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court
directly overruled its decision in Lawrence v. Texas,
539 U.S. 558 (2003), and held that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional.
In l986, who were we to really know we were doing much more than
tilting windmills? Even though the
first birth control clinic in the US was established by Margaret Sanger in
l914, the use of birth control between married couples did not become
recognized as a right of privacy protected in the Constitution until l965 in
Griswold v. Connecticut. Even then, millions of unmarried women in 26 states
were still denied birth control.
And now we are well into the 21st century and either
tomorrow, Friday, June 26, 2015 or Monday, June 29, 2015 the Supreme Court will
announce their decision about another personal freedom and liberty in this Land
of the Free. The court is deciding TWO things:
• Whether states can ban or not allow gay marriage as 13 states currently do.
• Whether states must recognize gay marriages conducted in other states.
In other words they
will have addressed whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to
marry, meaning a state can’t block that right regardless of popular opinion in
the legislature. They’re also expected to rule on whether states that don’t
allow same-sex marriage must recognize unions performed in other states.
Opponents of
state bans argued marriage is a fundamental right regardless of gender, and the
14th Amendment, originally written in to give ‘due process’ and ‘equal
protection’ to enslaved African-Americans after the Civil War, also gives gays
and lesbians equal marriage rights.
Supporters
of the appellate ruling supporting bans submitted briefs on behalf of dozens of
religious groups and Republican lawmakers including Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell and Ted Cruz of Texas. They argued the bans are a matter of states’
rights and were not put in place out of animosity toward gays and lesbians.
What are
those arguing for state’s rights to curtail human freedom really arguing for? I
think history has already supplied the answer—abundantly.
Just before
Halloween a few short years ago my partner and I were honored to be Best Man
and Best Woman at a sacred ceremony of commitment all those family and friends
attending called marriage. A state election a few days later called it illegal.
If the Supreme Court allows state bans in 2015, California’s
gay marriage ban would not be restored because the legal debate over it already
ended. The U.S. Supreme Court let stand a lower federal court ruling that
declared it unconstitutional, because those who tried to appeal it didn’t have
legal standing to call for the enforcement of a ban. The state’s governor or
attorney general could have appealed, but chose not to. That is not the
situation in all the states where bans have been in place.
Those of us who’ve stayed the course through history and
those generations today that view restrictions on the rights of anyone to
establish the kind and quality of identity, relationship and family of their
choosing as preposterous will prevail-- and maybe in a matter of hours. Then
we’ll truly have something to celebrate with fireworks, the true spirit and meaning of liberty in America.
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