When people of good faith try to legislate morality
I’ve probably already said enough about politics in these pages, and I probably shouldn’t wade into the morass of California initiatives since I no longer vote in this state. But in the current edition of High Country News, a Colorado-based paper that covers the West, I read the cover story: “Prophets and Politics; Will the Mormon Church decide who gets married in California?”
Editor Jonathan Thompson’s short column gets right to the heart of the subject: California’s Proposition 8, which would amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriage.
Thompson remembers when Colorado passed a similar amendment 16 years ago while he was a college student in New Mexico. During a discussion of the Constitution, his professor said the Colorado amendment was an example of a state expressing its culture without interference from Washington. Some of the students responded that Colorado’s culture must be perverted, because it attacked equality and rights.
“When such laws pass, they erode equality and codify bigotry,” Thompson said. “These anti-gay initiatives seek to force a specific religious doctrine on the populace as a whole, and that’s something that should worry us all.”
To those who want to erode the rights of others, or dynamite the wall that separates both church and state from each other, he cautioned: “The freedom, tolerance and diversity that you seek to extinguish is powerful. Like bindweed springing from the cracks in cement, it will always re-emerge.”
Reading that, I was reminded of why I’ve never weighed in on this issue and others that I find more appropriately addressed by family and church than by law. I speak now, from experience, to challenge the notion held by many religious folks that homosexuality is a choice, an exercise of free will they deem sinful.
Growing up in the Golden Age of Hollywood, I knew many homosexuals. Studios, however, insisted they remain in the closet, forcing actors to “date” starlets, in an effort to protect their reputations. Their real identities were simply never discussed. This was less a moral decision than one of a business. The studios owned the stars, and their reputations were guarded from gossip because the studios’ fortunes were tied to their fame.
My parents had many friends in this situation. Those who worked behind the camera had less to fear, and many were in committed relationships. For all intent and purpose, they were married. A few who were flamboyant in dress and manner were sometimes derided, but I thought of them more as being odd than amoral.
As a teenager, one of my best friends was dealing with this sort of identity crisis. We thought of her as a tomboy, good at sports, not vain the way most girls were who was fussing about their hair, nails and clothes. She was very responsible, well-liked, unpretentious, and, of all of us, seemed to have the most well defined sense of morality. She was the least likely to drink too much, always our designated driver. She never had dates, but didn’t seem to mind. We never guessed what she was going through.
Finally, she found a boyfriend, became engaged and got married. After a year or so, she had a child and then everything fell apart. She had a nervous breakdown and wound up in hospital, but was released just a few days later. She refused to return to her husband, and moved back into her parents’ home with her child. It was several years before we figured it out.
This was just one of many cases I knew well. What I learned from them is that homosexuality was no lifestyle choice. Every one of these kids, both boys and girls, would have given anything to have been “normal.” They fought against something within themselves that they couldn’t understand. They did everything they could to live up to their parents’ expectations. But in the end, the stress of living a lie was more than they could bear. Mostly they disappeared for a while, and later reemerged in a same-sex relationship. We were always surprised. How could we have been so dumb?
Looking back, it seems that we were the ones who failed them. We failed to understand how hard it is to be something you’re not, and we fail them still with our futile efforts to get them to conform to someone else’s idea of what is right.
And once again, we are asked to vote to amend (abandon) the Constitution that guarantees freedom from the moral impositions now thrust upon us by these bigoted laws. Thompson writes, “When religion remains where it belongs-in the churches and the home-it is an important part of the diversity and ripeness of culture. Once it begins to dominate politics, however, it begins to stifle that same culture.”
So why do people of good faith need to legislate their version of morality? Do they seek to protect their children from perceived threat or to secure their own position as partners in a “real marriage”?
Must we denigrate others’ relationships to elevate our own? I hope not.