One Fine Day

They deserved to lose.

by Jeffrey C. Billman

Last Wednesday, Aug. 4, was something of a crazy day.

It was Barack Obama's 49th birthday; or, if you subscribe to certain right-wing blogs, it was the 49th anniversary of the day Obama's mother gave birth to Malcolm X's love child in Kenya, then faked a Hawaiian birth certificate — excuse me, "certificate of live birth" — and newspaper announcements so that her black child could run for president four decades later and fulfill Marx's vision. A CNN poll found that 41 percent of Republicans doubt Obama's citizenship. On the bright side, it is now possible to quantify the derangement and/or racism permeating today's GOP.

Troubling though this may be, it was hardly the stuff of national headlines. The day had bigger fish to fry.

That morning, the Democrats in the U.S. Senate finally mustered enough votes to overcome a GOP filibuster and pass a $26 billion bill to help states deal with the aftermath of the Great Recession. Here in Pennsylvania, that means the state can bank $600 million in Medicaid funds of the $850 million lawmakers counted on when they passed their budget June 30. Without that money, the commonwealth was looking at thousands of state layoffs and massive service cuts. Nationwide, the bill will also save 140,000 teachers' jobs.

The sad thing is that there was a filibuster at all. The bill was deficit-neutral; without it, many states, including ours, would have plunged into economic chaos. And yet, the Republicans, almost to a man, wouldn't even let this thing come to a vote, because ... well, who the fuck knows? But at least sanity prevailed.

By evening, this story, too, was subsumed by a cannon shot in the Culture War: U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker's 138-page dissembling of the bigotry embodied in California's Proposition 8, the 2008 referendum that banned gay marriage. Immediately, anti-gay activist groups pounced: Walker, nominated to the federal bench by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, was a "judicial activist" who sought to "trample the written Constitution," proclaimed savecalifornia.com. "This is a tyrannical, abusive and utterly unconstitutional display of judicial arrogance" from a "practicing homosexual," the American Family Association screamed, demanding Walker's impeachment. The Mormon church declared — without a hint of self-awareness — that "marriage between a man and woman is the bedrock of society." It simply couldn't be that they lost because they deserved to lose. But if you look at the January trial itself, it's impossible to fathom how Walker could have reached any other conclusion. Prop 8 supporters presented no meaningful evidence, relying instead on stereotypes and assumptions completely unsupported by any data.

Indeed, Prop 8's lawyers called just two witnesses: the president of the Institute for American Values, who is not a peer-reviewed expert on anything; and a professor of government from Claremont McKenna College in California, who testified that gays are a politically powerful group, and as such, presumably, shouldn't be entitled to government protection. On cross-examination he admitted, in Walker's words, "he had not investigated the scope of private employment discrimination against gays and lesbians."

Prop 8's backers also submitted two depositions from professors of religious studies at Montreal's McGill University who were scared to testify in person, as if this were a mob trial. One of these noted that homosexuality is a "natural variant of human sexuality"; the other admitted that religion is the root of anti-gay sentiment.

Meanwhile, Prop 8 opponents presented a parade of actual experts — historians, psychologists, political scientists, public health scholars, economists — who made an empirical case that allowing gays to marry will not negatively affect straight marriages, children or society at large. Thus, Walker ruled, there is no legitimate basis for denying gays and lesbian the right to marry: "That the majority of California voters supported Proposition 8 is irrelevant, as" — he quotes case law — "'fundamental rights may not be submitted to [a] vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.'"

And so, the arc of the moral universe bends a little closer to justice tonight — at least in California. It will probably be a while before we can say the same of Pennsylvania, where it's still perfectly legal to fire someone simply for being gay. A bill to rectify this has languished in a state House committee since March 2009.

Here, it seems, some fundamental rights do depend on elections.

(jeffrey.billman@citypaper.net)