Equal Protection Under the Law

An extraordinary thing happened in the vice-presidential debate a few weeks ago, when Sarah Palin, the current flag bearer of the conservative movement in the United States, said that she supported the rights of homosexual couples to civil unions. Of course, she didn’t actually mean that – she was just pandering for votes. The Alaska Supreme Court required recognition of civil unions by a unanimous vote in October 2005, and Sarah Palin disagreed with that decision—but was required by law to enforce it. Still, she thought, if only for a moment, that it was politically wise to pretend, and she *hasn’t* thought it was politically wise to disavow that position on the campaign trail. Even Sarah Palin.

Now, Civil Unions are not equality, and they are not justice. That will, alas, take a long time to accomplish. Harry Truman began the project of integrating the Military in 1948, but it wasn’t finished until 1954, the same year Brown v. the Board of Education required integration of the schools. Laws against blacks and whites marrying were not struck down until 1967. Until then, progress, when it occurred, was state by state. We’re seeing the first few states turn just now to enable gay marriage.

But Civil Unions are the foot in the door. They give more rights to gay couples than they have without them.

For people born between 1979 and 1990, according to a Pew Research poll conducted this year, support for Gay Marriage and Civil Unions is almost identical – there’s just 3 percent difference between disapproval ratings for the two. The difference rises substantially with people with earlier birthdates, however. A majority of people born before 1958, however, disapprove of gay marriage, but a majority does not disapprove of civil unions. The gap between the two concepts is 14% in people who were born before 1943. So that distinction, between marriage and civil unions, is an important stumbling block to an earlier generation on this issue. As the percentage of the voting population that was born in the 60’s and later increases, we’re going to see a quite significant shift in the numbers, and the population that draws the distinction Joe Biden drew in the debate between Marriage and Civil Unions will become a vanishingly small group.

The reason that young people are more accepting, I suggest, is because they’ve seen healthy gay relationships among their peers. The reason old people are less accepting is because their gay peers had to hide their relationships, so they never saw them work. Just as Harry Truman making black people in just one segment of society led eventually to greater acceptance and eventual legal equality, so will civil unions make people less scared of gay people.

A lot of this will happen when judges recognize that the 14^th amendment, guaranteeing equal protection under the laws, doesn’t contain a special exclusion for gays and marriage. Judges tend to be older, but they also tend to be a bit better educated, and as time goes on the old ones retire and are replaced by people who have grown up in more enlightened times. It’s hard to be patient, but there is an inevitability to this. It’s no longer possible, I don’t think, to spook people into passing an amendment to the U. S. Constitution to stop it, so we don’t have to worry about that. We’ll get there.

Only a fool, however, would think that we won’t get there faster with Joe Biden and his running mate, than with Sarah Palin and hers. Even conservatives will benefit, I suspect, from moving past this issue, which they are doomed to lose anyway, and moving onto issues where they might, possibly, have a point.