I've grown impatient with objections to debates over gay marriage ban amendments--be they proposed or debated at the state or federal level--as being a waste of time. These objections are commonplace on the liberal blogosphere. The belief that banning gay marriage is wrong could be charitably inferred from the objections about time being wasted, but it's revealing that such a belief is not stated. Just two recent examples: here, where the dKos story author complains about Congress debating a gay marriage ban amendment while "Rome burns," and here, where Tom Grieve also deems the debate a waste of time.
But these debates are not merely wastes of time.
They are debates on an issue--a ban--that is akin to bans on mixed-race marriages; the ban, and any attempts legislative or judicial to limit the dignity of either Americans who happen to be gay or the long-term committed relationships they enter, represents an assault on both commonsense and the progress of American civil rights.
That's pretty serious. For congress to consider enacting such a ban isn't a waste of time, it's wrong.
I've read many proud, self-proclaimed liberals online and heard them in person here in New York City say that nothing should matter more to us progressives than Iraq. Iraq is the grand issue for today, no doubt--the mother of all issues--because it can encompass everything from the Bush deceptions to get us into the war/invasion/occupation of Iraq to the horrifically high cost we're suffering in terms of military wounded, lost international goodwill, drained coffers, and compromised security. I agree that the Iraq debacle is the most valuable political issue for those wishing to de-throne the Bushite-Republican "Oil and Christ! Now and Forever!" regime.
But why the dismissing of gay civil rights, too?
I find the dismissal of gay rights in the name of concentrating on Iraq to be problematic because just what "Iraq" means in these contexts is often left too undefined: leaving it? democratizing it? paying for our invasion of it? loudly blaming Bush for losing the post-invasion conflict there?
I find that often my fellow liberals who exhibit this passive aggressive dismissal of gay civil rights cite the deaths--military and civilian--in Iraq as part of the reason for the urgency about "Iraq." But how does it then follow that, somehow, talking about anything else--particularly gay civil rights-- is bad. What is mroe, attendant to their focus on Iraq seems an ignorance that the body count of gay Americans, mostly teenagers, who've over MANY DECADES killed themselves, lost jobs, been denied housing, been murdered, been beaten, been refused visitation rights or inheritance, been publicly mocked, or been driven from clubs, institutions, associations, families, or government because of how they are daily demonized (or, on a good day, trivialized or stereotyped) by American culture is higher than the body count from this horrible war in Iraq.
What is more, there seems also to be a failure to recognize that the grand confederacy of problems relating to Iraq, of which U.S. occupation is just a part, and their solutions involve so much beyond real U.S. control--including forces of globalization, Islamic extremism, nationalism, ethnic tensions, international relations between Iraq and the UN and the EU. To me, it is illogical for liberals to shy away from or downplay the important of gay civil rights as somehow non-pressing or a threat to finding solutions to Iraq-related problems, especially when one considers that civil rights for gay Americans is a domestic issue we do have comparatively greater control over as a nation. One might even ask, if we can't clean-up a domestic mess like codified discrimination against gay Americans, if we can't expand rights for any "homeland" minority, how can we expect to clean-up internationally significant and complex messes like the one Bush misled us into in Iraq?
Discrimination in the U.S. against its gay citizens, as with the even more bloody, once Constitutionally-sanctioned, and still grotesquely lingering discrimination against citizens who just happen to have certain skin colors is a festering problem not to be placed far down on the list of issues for progressive Democrats to tackle. It sure as hell shouldn't be treated as an issue that progressives--of all people, progressives!--really just wish would go away. The response to a proposed ban to codify a second-class status for an entire segment of citizenry shouldn't be, "Oo, what a waste a time to discuss that," but, "How disgusting to even propose such a thing." When conservatives debate gay marriage bans, it's not merely a waste of time, it's a sign of the very real and dangerous sickness of American bigotry, one that I suspect infects plenty of liberals, too.
