DERRICK Z. JACKSON
Beacon Hill is stuck in yesteryearIN THE LEADEN footsteps of white Southern governors and legislatures 50 years ago who ignored federal court orders and tried to bar black students from schools, Beacon Hill voted Monday for segregation. First, a defiant Massachusetts Legislature voted for a constitutional amendment that if approved by the voters in 2006 would ban gay marriage while establishing civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. Then, before the ink dried on the vote, Governor Mitt Romney hailed the Legislature.
Romney said he would fight for a stay of the Supreme Judicial Court's ruling that legalizes same-sex marriages starting on May 17. Like yesterday's Southern governors who were stuck in yesteryear, Romney predicted great chaos if the marriages went ahead for the 2 1/2 years before a vote. "If we begin providing for same-sex marriages on May 17, as ordered by the court, and then our citizens choose to limit marriage to a man and a woman, consistent with what the Legislature did today, we will have created a great deal of confusion." It is no small irony that the proclamations of chaos and confusion echoed Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas who resisted the integration of Little Rock High School under the pretense of sanity. In a 1986 interview, Faubus said: "The first duty of a chief executive is to maintain order. I can't think of any action I would change." The proclamations echo Ross Barnett, the Mississippi governor who temporarily scared off Attorney General Robert Kennedy from helping James Meredith enroll at the state university. Barnett told Kennedy: "There are several thousand people here in cars, trucks . . . there is liable to be a hundred people killed here. It would ruin all of us. Please believe me . . . a lot of people are going to get killed. It would be embarrassing to me." Worse, all the politicians on Beacon Hill who invoked religion to legitimize their prejudice sounded like George Wallace. Wallace, in trying to block black students from the University of Alabama, said, "We are God-fearing people, not government-fearing people." The debate around gay marriage has thankfully not sparked the violence of the 1950s and '60s. The echo of excuses to deny full citizenship to same-sex couples is no less offensive. There is no getting around the fact that creating civil unions for gay and lesbian people but banning them from marriage creates two classes of people. There is no reason that Romney, House Speaker Thomas Finneran, and Senate President Robert Travaglini should stand at podiums congratulating themselves. Finneran said: "It took an awful lot of effort, and it is designed principally to find a comfortable consensus in the middle, recognizing that there are going to be people on both sides of the debate who hold sincere, deeply held, principled views. I'm thrilled with the outcome." Continued... |
