There is a specter haunting America. That specter is the movement to promote homosexual marriage. The movement has adopted a cunning political strategy to appeal to everyone from the suburban soccer mom to the urban white male liberal: It has packaged its demand for a radical re-definition of marriage in the rhetoric and images of the Civil Rights Movement. This strategy, though utterly cynical and possibly racist, has enormous strategic utility. For what reasonable, fair-minded American could object to a movement that conjures up images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and pacifistic marchers facing down dogs and hoses? In the aftermath if the struggle for racial justice, who is prepared to risk being labeled a bigot for opposing the homosexual activist agenda?
As an exercise in marketing and merchandising, this strategy is the most brilliant playing of the race card in recent memory. Not since the “poverty pimps”, of thirty-five years ago, who leveraged the guilt and sense of fair play of the American public to hustle affirmative action set-asides, have we witnessed so brazen a misuse of African American history for partisan purposes.
But the partisans of homosexual marriage have a problem. There is no evidence in the historiographical literature of the Civil Rights Movement and its genesis in the struggle against slavery, to support their political and moral argument of equivalence. As the eminent historian Eugene D. Genovese observed over thirty years ago, the Black American experience as a function of slavery is unique and without analogue in the history of the United States. While other ethnic and social groups have experienced discrimination and hardship, none of their experiences historically and politically could compare with the physical and brutality of slavery. It was in the crucible of the unique experience of slavery the Civil Rights Movement was born.
The Civil Rights Movement was born with the establishment of the United States as a slaveholding republic. This extraordinary history included the kidnapping and brutal transport of Blacks from African shores, and the stripping of their language, identity, and culture in order to subjugate and exploit them. It also included the constitutional enshrining of these evils in the form of a Supreme Court decision—Dred Scott v. Sandford—denying to blacks any rights that whites must respect, and the establishment of Jim Crow and de jure racial discrimination after Dred Scott was overturned by a civil war and three historic constitutional amendments.
It is these basic facts that weaken the efforts of apologist for homosexual marriage to exploit the rhetoric of civil rights to advance the interest of a generally privileged group.
In fact, the campaign for homosexual marriage is, ironically, an assertion of white skin privilege. Frequently, same-sex couples wanting to “marry” are white lesbians who seek the accoutrements if family life, with kids and proverbial white picket fence, without the benefit of a father for the children. From their positions if socioeconomic privilege, they insist that their desires must be viewed as rights instead of preferences. The dominant demographic behind this political initiative is neither homosexual males nor people of color, notwithstanding the occasional interracial lesbian couple who are projected for propaganda purposes.
It is precisely the indiscriminate promotion of various social groups’ desires and preferences as rights that has eviscerated the moral authority of the paleo-liberal civil rights industry. Let us consider the question of rights. What makes a homosexual’s aspiration to overturn thousands of years if universally recognized morality and practice a “right”? Why should an institution designed for the reproduction of civil society and the rearing of children in a moral environment in which their interest are given pride of place be refashioned to accommodate relationships integrated around intrinsically non-marital conduct?
One must, in the current discussion, address directly the assertion of discrimination. The claim that the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman constitutes discrimination as based on a false analogy with statutory prohibitions on interracial marriages in many states through much of the 20th century. This alleged analogy collapses when one considers that skin pigmentation us utterly irrelevant to the procreative and unitive functions of marriage. Racial differences do not affect or interfere with the ability of sexually complementary spouses to become “one flesh,” as the Book of Genesis puts it, by sexual intercourse that fulfills the behavioral conditions of procreation. As the law of marital consummation makes clear, it is this bodily union that serves as the foundation of the profound sharing of life at every level—biological, emotional, dispositional, rational, and spiritual—that marriage is. This explains not only why marriage can only be between a man and a woman, but also why marriages cannot be between more than two people (despite the desire of polyamorist to have their sexual preferences and practices legally recognized and blessed).
Moreover, the analogy between the requirement if sexual complementarity and the prohibitions if interracial marriages disregards the fact that the whole point of those prohibitions was to maintain and advance a system of racial subordination and exploitation. It was to maintain a caste system in which one race was relegated to conditions of social and economic inferiority. The definition if marriage as the union of a man and a woman does not establish a sexual caste system or regulate one sex to conditions of social and economic inferiority. It does to be sure, exclude the recognition as lawful “marriages” of some forms of sexual combining—including polygyny, polyandry, polyamory, and same-sex relationships. But there is nothing invidious or discriminatory about laws that decline to treat all sexual wants or proclivities as morally equal. People are equal in worth and dignity, but sexual choices and lifestyles are not. That is why the law’s refusal to license polygamous, polyamorous , and homosexual unions is entirely right and proper. In recognizing, favoring, and promoting true marriage, the law does not violate the “rights” of people whose “lifestyle preferences” are denied the stamp of legal approval. Rather, it furthers and fosters the common good of civil society, and makes proper provision for the physical and moral protection and nurturing of children.
Well-intentioned moderates and liberals shudder upon hearing the very word “discrimination.” Its simple enunciation instills guilt and dulls their critical faculties. The word has now been emptied if its normative and historical content, thereby once again serving to disadvantage Blacks in American society. Malcontented members of any group—however privileged—can simply invoke the term and launch their own personalized civil rights industry. It is the recrudescense of a culture of narcissism.
Defending the Civil Rights legacy should prove cold comfort to its historic advocates, because the loss of its distinctive nature is our own fault. It was our failure, philosophically and politically, to develop a compelling historiography of the movement that contributed to its decline and decay. From the teaching in school, to the use of the term in the public square, the notion of civil rights has been diluted, ahistoricized, and nearly emptied of content in relation to the lived historical experience of Blacks in this country. That the authorized institutional inheritors if the Civil Rights Movement failed to recognize and prevent this loss brings in question their ability to continue as effective leaders of Black people.
It is especially sad and disturbing that the established leadership of the Civil Rights industry has utterly failed to resist the corruption and co—optation by a predominantly white special interest group of the history of the Civil Rights phase of the Black freedom struggle. This failure highlights the need for a regime change in favor of new leadership and a post-Civil Rights conceptual framework for addressing a more complex racial reality. Moreover, in light of the phenomenon of judicially mandated homosexual marriage, we believe that Black leaders need to speak forcefully in favor of President George W. Bush’s proposal for a Federal Marriage Amendment. If their support for true marriage alienates them from their white liberal friends, so be it. No community has suffered more than has ours from the weakening of the institution of marriage at the hands of purveyors of the doctrines of the sexual revolution. It is our sons and our daughters who have paid the bulk of the cost imposed by a cultural elite which seeks to overthrow cultural and Biblical principles of sexual restraint and responsibility. Leaders of our community should therefore be in the vanguard of the movement to prevent further moral erosion and begin reversing historical declines.
We respectfully suggest that Martin Luther King, Jr. did not give his life, nor Fannie Lou Hamer struggle, so that libertines could be free to pursue their polymorphous forms of sexuality under the banner if the Black Civil Rights Movement.
Eugene F. Rivers, 3rd is Founder and President of the Seymour Institute for Advanced Christian Studies (www.siacs.org).
Kenneth D. Johnson is Senior Fellow for Social Policy and Civil Society at the Seymour Institute foe Advance Christian Studies.
