Because we’re doing it again.
Today is the 70th anniversary of the end of the two-day race riot known as Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass,” when Nazi brownshirts and the Aryan equivalent of the KKK destroyed 276 synagogues across Germany, along with hundreds of Jewish businesses, with 91 Jews being killed in the process. This was in 1938, eight years into Hitler’s consolidation of power and mounting propaganda effort to blame all of Germany’s ills on the Jews (with lesser roles for Gypsies, Communists, leftists, homosexuals, labor union leaders and “race traitors”).
Two years earlier, Hitler’s regime instituted the Nuremburg Laws, stripping German Jews of their citizenship, banning them from political participation of any kind, and prohibiting Jews from marrying German citizens.
While nothing on this scale has happened in the U.S. since the decimation of Native Americans in the 19th century, Californians took a step toward their own Nuremburg laws last Tuesday, stripping a select portion of residents of one of the rights most important to human beings: the right to bind oneself, with the legal recognition of the state, to the individual of one’s choosing.
This is the first time in U.S. history that any government has stripped existing rights away from citizens who have done nothing to forfeit those rights.
And it was done with a simple majority vote, by self-identified church-goers who believe marriage is inextricably tied to the sacred rites of their faith, rather than being a simple contract recognized by the state to in order to classify the individuals involved for purposes of taxation, parental rights, and healthcare decision-making, but most of all for determining property rights and responsibility for debts.
This is how marriage started in the West: not as the solemnizing of a union under the aegis of one religion or another, but to say to the community at large “A and B are now a unit.” (And, for most of the history of marriage, and where B was female, to say “B, and all of her property, are now the property of A, to dispose of as he wishes.”) Marriages before this point were all of the common-law variety: A just picked B and brought her home (or more likely negotiated with B‘s father on the price to be paid for, or the dowery to be transferred with, ownership rights to B).
Then the Catholic Church got involved in marriage as it gets involved in every area of its adherents’ lives: for purposes of control. This was not just to quash divorce (which left women to be cared for by the Church, a drain on profits) and to enforce the Biblical decree to “be fruitful and multiply” (Rome was forever in need of more bodies with which to expand its Empire), but to protect the Church’s assets from the demands of wives and children. By deciding who could and could not marry, the Church could reinforce the laws of primogeniture, take 2nd born sons for priests and condemn them to celibacy, and pair up the rest to best serve the Church itself. It was not much different than breeding livestock.
As civilization progressed and the power of the Church declined with the Protestant movement and the rise of the individual both politically and commercially, it became all the more important to vest symbolic power in the sacraments and rites. You may not be a serf tending the Bishop’s fields anymore, but God would strike you down if you didn’t continue to obey His laws, as delineated by the Pope. And while the Catholic Church was more limited in the parts of the Bible they chose to enforce, the Protestants put the Bible in the hands of the flock, and the number of possible transgressions multiplied by orders of magnitude. The hellfire and brimstone of the Protestant church made sins against these newfound Biblical laws even more frightening.
Now comes the Mormon Church, with its angel Moroni handing golden tablets to his chosen prophet Joseph Smith, and old Joe – who had an eye for the ladies and had made a living knowing an easy mark when he saw one – understood the power of marriage beyond mere control of women and their property. Get control of sex, and you got control of men, as well – especially if you give them carte blanche and while keeping their wives monogamous.
So, with Joe on the brink of getting himself castrated for dallying with the daughters of his followers, God conveniently revealed to him that the men of the church were to spread their seed far and wide, “should they continue as innumerable as the stars; or, if ye were to count the sand upon the seashore ye could not number them”:
61…[I]f any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him; for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth unto him and to no one else.
…
63 But if one or either of the ten virgins, after she is espoused, shall be with another man, she has committed adultery, and shall be destroyed; for they are given unto him to multiply and replenish the earth, according to my commandment, and to fulfill the promise which was given by my Father before the foundation of the world, and for their exaltation in the eternal worlds, that they may bear the souls of men; for herein is the work of my Father continued, that he may be glorified.
Now, we come to Proposition 8, passed into law last week in California.
Eighty percent of the funding in favor of Proposition 8 was provided by the Mormon Church, with much of the remainder coming from Catholics; there is no question that in the minds of those who wanted Prop 8 to pass, there was a religious reason for it.
This is, of course, completely odds with the U.S. Constitution, which preserves to all individuals from of – and freedom from – religion. But because the religious reasoning behind Prop 8 is not explicit, this all-but-overt breach of the First Amendment is not among the bases for legal challenges to this new, hateful and exclusionary part of the California state constitution.
And as to Kristallnacht, and why I brought the Nazis into this in the first place?
Because if California can, by a simple majority vote of the people, and on a surreptitiously religious basis strip a class of its citizens of their right to marry, what is to keep them from stripping other groups of their rights?
For example, atheists like me are the most untrustworthy bunch in the country, if polls are to be believed. Why not stop us from marrying, or from adopting kids and indoctrinating them into our heinous lifestyle?
Granted, it would be a challenge to write a proposition without reference to religion that stripped away the rights of an atheist; nothing is so simple as identifying a person by a physical characteristic.
And that is the true reason behind Proposition 8. As humans, we have some monkey-brain need to hold ourselves above a distinct Other; we must be King of the Hill, at least in our own minds. Most easily-spotted – and therefore easily discriminated against – groups have been protected by the 14th Amendment, at least as far as government treatment and public accommodations are concerned. But, at least at the federal level, we still get to hate on the gays pretty much at will.
This is changing, ever so slowly. But California’s vote last week has been a steel-toed boot in the nuts for those of us who care about genuine equality for all. And that the handmaidens to the passage of Prop 8 were the Catholic Church (no stranger to discrimination or homosexuality) and the Mormon Church (no strangers to discrimination on the marriage front) and African American churchgoers (no strangers to discrimination and hate crimes) is the rotten icing on this moldy and putrefied cake.
The Bible says varied and contradictory things about marriage, sexuality and relationships: it hails both wives as property and priests dismembering their concubines. The Mormon Doctrine and Covenants blesses polygamy and then denounces it.
Every religion denounces some group or another out of an existential need to be the One True Faith.
But in its better moments, religion gives us higher virtues: Judge not lest ye be judged. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
If the evangelicals are correct in saying that this nation was founded by Christian men,* then it was to these commandments that those men adhered when they wrote that all men are created equal, and are endowed with inalienable rights.
“Inalienable” means that those rights cannot be taken away by any man – or woman. Not even when they are in the majority.
The election of Barack Obama to the presidency was a beautiful step in the right direction for this country – but the passage of Prop 8 was an even larger step back, because it took away a basic right of a class of its citizens.
I never thought I would live to see an African American elected President. Now I wonder if I’ll live to see gay marriage given full faith and credit in all 50 states. It seems like such a small thing to ask.
*I don’t believe they are.
