Why Anti-Gay Politics Will Inevitably Fail

Jonathan Rauch has a terrific column on the politics of the Federal Marriage Amendment (now apparently called the Marriage Protection Amendment). Why would the Republican leadership bother to bring up a bill for a vote that they know has no chance of passing? Pure demagoguery:

The MPA would amend the U.S. Constitution to forbid gay couples to marry. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., says he will bring the amendment up during the week of June 5. It has zero chance of passing by the required 67-vote majority, as Frist knows. In 2004, the amendment garnered only 48 Senate votes, and the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, figures it will get only about 52 votes this year.

So why bother? Consider Virginia, where in 2004 the Republican-controlled Legislature hit on the promising formula of passing both a whopping tax increase and a gratuitously vindictive anti-gay-marriage law. (The so-called Marriage Affirmation Act outlawed not only gay marriage and civil unions, but also private contracts between same-sex individuals seeking to replicate marital arrangements.) Lyndon Johnson once said, "Hell, give [a man] somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." The Virginia formula was in that vein: Knock the gays hard enough, and maybe conservatives wouldn't notice the tax hike.

This is the politics of division at its finest. The Republicans are in terrible shape and they know it. They've had exclusive control of the White House and both houses of Congress since 2000 and what do they have to show for it? A Federal government ballooning out of control, growing at an astonishing rate. Along with that, the largest deficits in our history and overall debt in the many trillions of dollars. A war that has turned into a disaster, cost ten times as much as they assured us it would and, in all likelihood, only made us less safe.

What do you do when you have no actual achievements to point to in telling the voters why you should keep them in office, when your track record has the American people calling you the worst president in three generations by a wide margin? You either create imaginary victories, or motivational defeats. The gay marriage amendment is intended to create a motivational defeat. They know that they will lose, but in losing they will be able to say to their anti-gay followers, "You see, we tried. We tried to save marriage and protect the moral fabric of America, but those {insert one or more of the following here: liberals, activist judges, radical homosexuals, cultural elites, Hollywood degenerates, Godless heathens, etc} stopped us. All the more reason why you must vote for us again, so we can keep fighting the good fight for moral values, Moms and apple pie."

Never mind that no one has ever made a coherent, much less compelling, argument for why allowing gays to get married will do anything whatsoever to damage heterosexual marriages. The anti-gay marriage position is not based on reason, it is based on bigotry. For all practical purposes, the opposition is a mob and you control mobs by appealing to their base emotions, by telling them who is to blame for the thing that outrages them. This playbook has been used time and time again throughout our history. Its antecedents can be seen in regresssive populist movements going back even to the time of our founding.

The strategy has lasted this long because it works, but only for a time. Before long, public opinion evolves away from bigotry and toward extending the promises of our founding. When the same cards were played by those who opposed civil rights for blacks in the 1950s - "If you let those negroes have their way, they'll be coming for your daughters next!" - it worked, for a time. But when the dire predictions of impending doom from the leaders of the reactionary mob don't come true, the public no longer takes those leaders seriously.

What changed our minds about blacks is the same thing that will change our minds about gays - getting to know them. Segregation kept most whites away from blacks, so they were distant and known only through folklore. They were simply Them. But as whites mixed with blacks after integration, they found out that, in fact, blacks weren't Them, they were Us. They laughed and they loved and they cried and they had thoughts to communicate - just like us. And the more the two groups got to know each other, the more the fear of each other subsided and was replaced with a recognition of our shared humanity.

The same thing is going on now with gays and lesbians. For the longest time, they were closeted. We all probably knew gay people, but we didn't know that we knew them because they were pretending to be straight, often in sham marriages. But popular culture did for gays what integration did for blacks, gave them a face and a reality. As more and more gay entertainers came out of the closet, it inspired average everyday gay people to come out of the closet and decide no longer to be ashamed. As gays won legal victories for protection, it became safer to be out of the closet. And over the last few decades, we have seen those barriers begin to break down just as they once did between blacks and whites.

Now virtually everyone knows gay people, or knows that they know them at least. As more straight people interact with gay people in business, at school, in the media, even in church, it becomes harder and harder to cast them in the role of Them. We can listen to the songs of Melissa Etheridge, for example, and it makes us understand that gays go through the same experiences we do - they fall in love, they hurt each other and get hurt, they break up and feel angry or sad. We can see our gay friends interact with their lovers and, more and more, with their children, and we see that they are no different than we are. They love just like we do. They get angry just like we do. Their children misbehave just like ours do and they have to clean up the dirty diapers just like we do. And after a while, they are no longer Them, they're Us.

America, while lagging behind much of the world in this regard, is already well on its way down this inexorable path, the same path we have tread as a society many times before. That's why poll after poll shows that young people don't hold the same anti-gay views that their parents and grandparents did or still do. That's why we see the growth of gay/straight clubs in schools all over the nation, because younger people are so used to being around gays that they already view them as Us. That's why even over the last 3 years of this controversy, we've already seen a major shift in public attitudes toward gays. 2/3 of the nation now recognizes that gay relationships deserve financial and legal protection in one form or another, even if they're reluctant to call it marriage. And those trends will continue to get better, as they always have in the past.

To the leaders of the anti-gay mob - Bill Frist, James Dobson, Gary Bauer, and so many more - I say this: your time is almost up. Just like your reactionary predecessors, you only get to use this play for a short time before the public wises up and moves on. The anti-integration movement was still strong a mere 40 years ago; today, it is political suicide even to speak in veiled terms of that movement as anything but vile. The same thing will happen to you, and I think you know it. A generation from now, gay marriage in some form will be a reality and no one will be able to believe that this was such a big deal that caused such an uproar only a short time ago. A generation from now, we will look back at people like Alan Keyes and Karl Rove and view them just like we view George Wallace today - as demagogues fomenting bigotry for their own political gain.

The great irony in all of this is that these same men love to lace their speeches with appeals to our founding fathers, yet it is the principles laid down by those men (even if they themselves did not apply them consistently) that will cause their downfall. The notion that every person has an unalienable right to live their life and to pursue happiness as they see fit so long as they don't harm others while doing so has a powerful pull on Americans, even if we don't always hear its call as soon as we should. Martin Luther King appealed to that ideal as a promissory note that had to be paid in justifying the equal treatment of blacks, and gays today appeal to that same principle in calling for their own equality before the law. And while we may be slow as a people to get there, we always seem to come back, in the end, to those principles stated so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence.

The entire history of our nation is the story of the slow and steady, if often difficult, progression of those principles being applied to a wider and wider segment of society. As such, I actually find it exciting to live in times like this. We get to watch it happen. And history tells us that we will win this battle and that, in short order, the tide will turn. Mark my words on this, my friends: like the racists of yesteryear, the anti-gay bigots will, in the next 20 or 30 years, find that their opinions are so universally rejected that it will no longer be politically safe to espouse them in public. And then, irony of ironies, it will be the bigots who will find themselves in the closet.