Common Folk Using Common Sense

Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You didn’t place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.

This is from Jamie Raskin, testifying Wednesday, March 1, 2006 before the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee in response to a question from Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs about whether marriage discrimination against gay people is required by “God’s Law.”

Before you get all cross-eyed with confusion, let’s clear up a few things. I’m a Conservative Libertarian. I believe that all US citizens should be free to do as they please as long as their actions in no way harm another.

I am also a Christian. I believe in one God, and that His one and only Son, Jesus the Christ, came to live on Earth as a human and sacrificed Himself on a cross in order to forgive me of my sins, so that I may live with God for all eternity.

I am not a Republican. I agree with a number of things that most Republicans believe, but I am not a card-carrying Republican.

I despise Democrats and a lot of what they stand for. I despise an even larger proportion of Liberals and what they stand for. But on this one instance they have it right.

Jamie Raskin is a Democrat (ugh!). Wednesday, March 1st, at the invitation of Equality Maryland, Jamie testified in front of the Maryland State Senate against the proposed anti-gay amendment, Senate Bill 690, that would write discrimination into the state Constitution.

Maryland Senate Bill 690 reminds me of the 18th Amendment, Prohibition, which we adopted at the national level in 1919. The outburst of self-righteous moralism which produced this amendment eventually subsided and Prohibition was repealed after fourteen bloody and disastrous years. It was supposed to get rid of the social ills associated with drinking.

But you cannot legislate your version of morailty and try to apply it to other people. I understand that you believe it with all your heart, and to imagine a world contrary to it causes you sleepless nights. But if two gay men, or two lesbian women, want to marry, then by all means let them. Who elected you Chairman of the Morality Police? Aren’t actions like these the very things we laugh at Saudi Arabia about?

BUT GET OVER IT.

As far as I can tell, the argument for writing marriage discrimination into our Constitution rests on essentially theological premises: God forbids gay marriage; my church opposes it; it violates natural law; and so on.

But these arguments reflect a basic confusion about the American Constitution and our framework of liberty. Under our First Amendment, the State may never dictate to a church who it must marry. If the government wants to force a church to marry inter-faith couples or interracial couples or a couple of people who had been divorced or a gay couple, but the church does not want to marry these people for its own theological reasons, the government loses and the church wins. Under the Free Exercise Clause, a church may marry only those people it wants to marry and reject the rest even for reasons that other people may consider narrow-minded, stupid or prejudiced or indeed for no reason at all.

But, at the same time, individual churches or even coalitions of churches may never dictate to the State who it may marry. Even if a group of large churches decides that it is irreligious or sacrilegious or just plain evil for people to marry outside of their faiths or across racial lines and the churches mobilize their members to lobby the state legislature to unanimously pass a law against miscegenation or inter-faith marriage, these law will be struck down. They violate Due Process, Equal Protection and the Establishment Clause.

The supposition seems to be that gay and lesbian Americans, unlike “the rest of us”, have chosen their sexuality and have chosen wrong. But all of the gathering scientific evidence suggests very strongly that our sexual orientation has a hereditary and biological basis. Think of the gay people you know in your families or friends; now think of the straight people. Do you really think they have freely chosen their sexual orientation? Do you really think doctors can turn millions of gay men and women into straight people with pills or surgery or therapy?

All of the scientific and anecdotal evidence we have suggests that our sexual orientation is simply part of us, like our hair color. Should there be a law keeping brown-headed people from marrying simply because Judas, Jesus’ traitor, had brown hair?

What ills will befall you if two gay guys marry? How have you been harmed if two women decide to commit to each other for the rest of their lives?

America is for all its citizens regardless of religion and because so many churches have so many different belief systems, we are governed here not by religious law but by secular law. The rules of civil marriage - the license that the State grants you to marry - must be determined with respect to the federal and state Constitutions, not particular religious claims, no matter how fervently held.

The church building and the state capitol are two very different buildings, as it should be. The state government does not meet in a sanctuary, or a synagogue, or a mosque, as it should be. People’s beliefs are good things, and I don’t want to come across as putting down someone’s strongly-held faith. But just because one person believes something does not make it become a law for all people.

In 1967 the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia struck down Virginia’s law against whites marrying African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Hispanics despite the fact that it was overwhelmingly popular and its champions invoked Biblical authority for its legitimacy. The Court found that Equal Protection and the Due Process right to marry are supreme in America; they control and displace discriminatory state marriage laws, even ones based on religious ideas that majorities passionately endorse.

There is a DIFFERENCE between the marriage ceremony that your local church performs and one that the state performs. There is a Christian marriage, there is a Jewish marriage, there is a Hindu marriage - and there is a state-recognized Civil marriage. The Jews cannot tell the Christians who or how to marry. The Hindus cannot tell the Jews who or how to marry. And none of them can tell the State who or how to marry.

Your church will never have to perform a marriage ceremony of any gay couple or indeed any couple of any kind that it disapproves of. Just don’t apply your moral requirements, no matter how “correct in God’s eyes” they may be, to the State.

THE CONSTITUTION IS NOT ONE OF THE BOOKS IN THE BIBLE, AND THE BIBLE IS NOT ONE OF THE SECTIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION.

The State today is stopping many churches and temples from marrying gay couples that the churches want to marry. That is, the State today is violating the rights of many churches - including Unitarian, Episcopal, Presybeterian and Jewish congregations, among many others - who seek to perform lawful weddings for their parishioners but may not simply because other groups of citizens think it would be wrong for them to do it. And it’s all because you deem your morals to be “higher” than the morals of these other congregations.

Folks, we’ve got Islamofacists wanting to kill you and your children. We’ve got supposed “representatives” going to Washington just to discover new ways to take more money out of your wallet. We’ve got no secure borders anywhere in the US. We’ve got huge groups of people that want to replace our system of Capitalism with their version of Socialism. And yet you’re going to stay awake at night just because two people honestly and completely love and care for each other but they happen to be of the same gender?

I could care less if two men or two women marry each other. I have far more important things to worry about.

Jamie Raskin, Conservative, Libertarian, Christian, Liberal, moral, gay, lesbian

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