29.09.2004

A constitution thing

Martin Schreader reports from the latest developments in the US elections

When Pat Buchanan took to the podium during the 1992 Republican national convention to rally the troops to fight the ‘culture war’, he was not trying to win them to a new view, but rather was preaching to the battle-weary. The ‘culture war’ - a euphemism for an all-sided attack on the rights of working and oppressed people - had in fact been going on since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981.

It began with the so-called ‘welfare mother’, a stereotypical single African-American woman with two or more children living on public assistance. From there, it mushroomed to include anyone who was not part of the ‘Reagan revolution’ - ie, anyone who was not straight, white, male and either bourgeois or ‘middle class’.

The ‘culture war’ laid the basis for the attacks on poor workers and the oppressed for years to come, through a process of demonising and dehumanising them, in order to make it more publicly acceptable to strip these people of their basic dignity. Former president Bill Clinton carried out the most well known, and most successful, line of attack, when he decided to “end welfare as we know it”.
But economic austerity and degradation were not the only weapons at the disposal of the capitalists when they started the ‘war’. The demonisation and humiliation of working and oppressed people also worked very effectively on those they wanted to shove into the dark corners of society. Such has been the fate of lesbians and gay men in this country.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, the lesbian-gay community has come under increasingly bitter attack by the state and reactionary forces. This author can recall, for example, an incident in 1982 in the town where he grew up, when a mob of ‘concerned citizens’ burned a gay bar to the ground while the police stood by and watched. And there are few who do not know of the fate of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.
Nevertheless, the 1990s saw gays and lesbians gaining a measure of acceptance in society ... up to a point. That point - recognition of same-sex couples as equal to heterosexuals (the ‘gay marriage’ debate) - has become a ‘wedge issue’ in this year’s election.

However, it is a ‘wedge issue’ that is a little confusing. This is because, when you strip away all the rhetoric that the two main candidates, Bush and Kerry, feed their base constituencies, they hold more or less the same position: strident opposition to equality for gay couples and acceptance of non-binding civil unions as an alternative.

As with many of these kinds of ‘culture war’ issues, religion and politics have blended together in a reactionary stew of backwardness and chauvinist posturing. This was best expressed by Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who stated his unwillingness to defend the rights of same-sex couples with the phrase, “It’s a Jesus thing”.

Sorry, Mr Mayor, but you are wrong. It’s not a ‘Jesus thing’: it’s a constitution thing.

Section 1 of the 14th amendment to the US constitution says in part: “All persons born or naturalised in the United States ... are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside .... No state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This means that any person who is a citizen of the US has equal protection under the law to access state-provided services.
I don’t know how marriage licenses and certificates are handed out in Britain, but here in the US you get these legal documents from a state agency - usually a county clerk. In other words, all citizens have the right to receive this state service, regardless of whether their partner is of the same or opposite gender.

However, because the reactionary ‘culture warriors’ have been allowed to frame the debate in religious terms, and have played on the backwardness and fears of the public, they have been able to convince a number of generally intelligent and rational people to oppose the basic democratic rights contained in the 14th amendment - including many African-Americans, for whom it was originally adopted.

And civil unions? Are they not an acceptable alternative? No. In the view of both the Republican and Democratic parties, civil unions are not meant to have an equal standing with marriage, and states would have the right to reject recognition of these partnerships (in violation of both the amendment and the ‘full faith and credit’ clause). This is why there has been a push to amend the constitution to restrict marriage to heterosexual couples. It would take such an action to nullify the rights of same-sex couples guaranteed to them.

The adoption of this kind of legislation would only be the second time in US history that the constitution has had a restrictive amendment added. The first time was when federal government prohibited the sale and distribution of alcohol. In its time, prohibition was also seen as a popular move and “a Jesus thing”. The result, however, was the exponential growth of an underground economy and organised crime that preyed on the most vulnerable elements of society.

Many gay and lesbian couples will go to the polls in November thinking that their vote for Kerry will bring them some measure of greater freedom. That ‘freedom’, however, will come at a price: denial of the right to be treated as equals in a nominally democratic society.

But, as Sherlock Holmes might say, there is the rub. The United States is a bourgeois-democratic country, but there is no bourgeois-democratic wing that will defend the basic rights enshrined in the constitution. We saw that in 2000-01, when working people and middle-class democrats took to the streets to mount the only real challenge to the Bush-Cheney theft of the election, and the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties denounced them.

More on this last point in a future column.