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Maine not the road to marriage equality (or, Ya cant get theyah from heyah)
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Today’s column hopes to uncover a silver lining to Tuesday night’s not so nice news out of New England.
As with California’s Prop 8 in 2008, we have experienced yet another case of the fundamental flaw of direct democracy: the tyranny of the majority over the minority. This past May Maine made history when its legislature expanded the state’s marriage laws to include same-sex couples. Prior to Governor John Baldacci signing that legislation into law, all prior advances in the marriage equality movement were made by way of the courts. Those opposing same-sex marriage immediately set to work on getting a people's veto of that bill added to the November ballot.
The victory of Maine’s anti-marriage proponents was a decisive 53% to 47% (fewer than 30,000 votes), almost identical to the 52% to 48% spread for California’s Prop 8. But “decisive” is certainly not the same as a “landslide”. These were almost 50/50 splits in states that only 15 years ago polled at less than 30% support for marriage equality.
In those 15 years opposition shrank by more than 1% each year. So in these states at least, support for treating same-sex couples exactly the same as opposite-sex couples is almost an even split. Pretty impressive considering that only 40 years ago same-sex attraction was listed as a psychiatric disorder by the American Psychiatric Association and punishable in most states by imprisonment .
To put this in perspective, let’s look at the legal and social acceptance timeline of another marriage equality struggle that by coincidence recently resurfaced as a national topic – interracial marriage:
1948: the California State Supreme Court legalizes interracial marriage, at a time when 90% of American adults opposed it.
1967: The U.S. Supreme Court catches up to California almost 20 years later and legalizes interracial marriage across the nation. 72% of U.S. adults still opposed it.
1991: According to Gallop which had been polling public opinion on interracial marriage since 1958, 1991 was the first polling in which those opposed to interracial marriage were in the minority. Yes, that was only 18 years ago.
It took 43 years for the general population to catch up with the California Supreme Court‘s decision that the law applies to all citizens.
Although there were isolated attempts at legalizing marriage as far back as the early 1970s, marriage didn’t become a significant front in the LGBT civil rights movement until 1996 when the Hawaii Supreme Court drew intense national attention when it ruled that the state did not provide a compelling Constitutional reason to deny same-sex couples marriage certificates. As with 30 other states afterwards, the majority of Hawaii’s citizens decided in 1998 that their Constitution should be amended to ensure their fellow citizens never enjoy the laws supporting one of the most important institutions for personal security and well-being.
In 2004 Massachusetts became the first state to include same-sex couples under its marriage laws. One year later a CBS/Quinnipac poll showed between 45-50% of U.S. adults support at least some sort of legal recognition of same-sex couples. And that was only 9 years after the Hawaii Court’s ruling. Depending on the poll being referenced, as of 2009 full marriage equality has roughly double the support that interracial marriage enjoyed even after it was legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967.
All of the above illustrates the impressive gains made by the LGBT community in a remarkably condensed period of time. After thousands of years of persecution it has only been 40 years since New York’s Stonewall Riots kicked off the LGBT civil rights movement, and already there are several countries where they enjoy full or nearly full equality in all facets of citizenship, and things continue to improve in the U.S. As with much of the world these days everything seems to move at an accelerated pace, so a movement that might have taken 100 years, such as that of African-Americans between Emancipation and the end of Segregation, might see progress in far less time.
So there you have it, the silver lining out of Maine is that almost half their voters support equality when as recently as 40 years ago almost all of them would have probably preferred to have LGBT’s imprisoned or sent for shock therapy.
Another lining is that unlike other recent anti-gay votes around the country, Maine's Question 1 is a People's Veto, meaning that instead of creating a law or constitutional amendment it simply struck down an existing law. That veto can be overturned by the legislative and executive branches. While it is extremely remote that enough politicians would consider going against the majority of voters, maybe the spirit of Margaret Chase Smith will possess her fellow Mainers to do the right thing.
Tuesday wasn’t a complete loss at the ballot box. Same-sex couples in Washington State advanced to “everything but marriage” status when a slim majority of its citizens approved Referendum 71. Same-sex couples can now enter into domestic partnerships that afford the separate but equal rights of marriage afforded at the state level.
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