Could We Please Quit Pretending It’s About Marriage Equality?
by Tom Gilson, The Stream:
Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education is opposed to marriage equality. Representative Tom Price, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of HHS, is also opposed to marriage equality. Three other Trump Cabinet selections are against marriage equality, according to the strongly pro-gay Human Rights Campaign. Vice-President-elect Mike Pence has been working against it for years.
Brian Soucek, an acting professor of law at UC Davis, views all this with alarm. He wants to ward off “the threat to marriage equality in California” by repealing Proposition 8 — in case a future U.S. Supreme Court repeals its recent pro-gay marriage ruling.
I hate to tell him, but whether or not Proposition 8 is repealed, there’s going to be marriage inequality either way. There’s marriage inequality even now, under Obergefell v. Hodges. The case was always billed as a battle for marriage equality, but that was never what it was about.
It’s time we quit pretending. It isn’t just Donald Trump’s Cabinet that disbelieves in marriage equality. It isn’t just Jimmy Seibert, controversial pastor to HGTV’s Chip and Joanna Gaines. It’s Brian Soucek, too. It’s the Human Rights Campaign, along with virtually every other gay activist. It’s all of us.
No one believes in marriage equality.
No one, that is, except members of the hyper-radical fringe who want to do away with marriage altogether. They’re the only ones who really believe in marriage equality. Otherwise “marriage equality” has never been anything but a slogan.
Rhetoric in Action
It’s a good one, as slogans go; I’ll grant it that. Borrowed straight from America’s most magnificent noble ideals, it’s got the all right stuff to pack a a powerful rhetorical punch. Why shouldn’t marriage equality be self-evidently a human right, just as much as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness! Who could possibly oppose such a positive vision?
But it gets better. The phrase also trades in the guilt we’ve felt over falling short of our country’s founding ideals. No sensitive human being would be caught dead being against it — not after all the ethical and social failures we’ve been guilty of for so long. We’re not making those mistakes again!
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