The Long Road To Equality: How The Other Side Has Always Been Wrong

(Judge Leander Perez, Dixiecrat and Segregationist, 1968)

(Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Marriage Equality opponent)

It's safe to say that not everybody in or outside of New York was elated by the late-breaking news that the New York State Legislature, with a Republican-controlled Senate, had legalized same-sex marriage after weeks of debate and national attention, becoming the largest state to make marriage equality legal. Many of the voices in opposition were relatively muted, it seems - in one sign of how much progress has been made, most dissenters fell back on legal or technical arguments rather than forecasting the end of society. Even many religious leaders expressed their disappointment in language that steered free of the hate and bigotry that until quite recently had defined the vast majority of the arguments against gay equality in this country.

Except, of course, it's not that simple. If most opponents to marriage equality have learned the need to couch their dissatisfaction in language suitable for the nightly news and acceptable to an increasingly open-minded public, anybody capable of analyzing basic speech patterns should have little trouble uncovering what lies beneath - namely, opinions and beliefs that differ from the segregationists and anti-miscegenation forces of decades past only in their chosen target. To glance back at the views freely and openly expressed by national politicians on television and in print just fifty years ago - to hear a Judge firmly declaim that no society has ever survived racial integration, or another Judge insist God placed different ethnicities on different continents to keep them from mixing, or to hear a Southern senator dare the military to try and enforce racial equality upon his society - is to be struck by two things. One is a sort of shock that such blatantly racist and bigoted statements were unashamedly made in front of cameras or reporters. The other is to caution one's self that we haven't moved very far from those days, and that in another fifty years, the words and actions of Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Senator Ruben Diaz, and columnist George Weigel may well shock those looking back at our own struggles for equality.

One of the great things about studying history is that it helps one stay on the right side of it. I offer six examples below - three from the past, three from last week - of individuals very much on the wrong side.

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Firing Line transcript, April 15 1968 (video segment here)

Judge Leander Perez

I am not a racist. I might mention I am against the Federal Government using its coercive power to force racial integration upon an unwilling free people. Because never in the history of nations has any government prior to this ever attempted to use its coercive power to force racial integration upon an unwilling free people. I am a fundamental Constitutionalist. I know it is wrong fundamentally, and I know it is strictly rotten politics from Washington, and has motivated enforced integration policies of the national government.

William F. Buckley

Well, Governor, have you been widely misquoted? For instance, you're quoted as having said, 'Yes, the Negro is inherently immoral—yes, I think it's the brain capacity.' Is that a misquotation?"

Judge Leander Perez

It's not a misquotation. It's the truth. Because I know Negroes. We have a number of Negroes in our community, and I know that basically, fundamentally, they are immoral, they are unmoral. I know that to be a fact. Why should I try to hide it? I’d be untrue to myself if I tried to deny it out of cowardice.

William F. Buckley

It’s been said of you…that you can begrudgingly admire his bluntness, he is honest about his bigotry.

Judge Leander Perez

I’m not a bigot, sir. I’m not a bigot at all.

William F. Buckley

But, look, whatever you are, Judge Perez, and I’m sure you’re a good many things, but you don’t have the sovereign power of the English language.

Judge Leander Perez

No, I don’t have any control over hypocrites, over bigots – no. Over those who would deprive American citizens of their Constitutional rights. I have no power over them at all.

William F. Buckley

Do Negroes have Constitutional rights?

Judge Leander Perez

Absolutely. Same as any other people. But the Negroes are certainly not exercising Constitutional rights when they go about burning down cities and crying, “Burn, baby, burn,” and “kill whitey”.

William F. Buckley

Nor are whites exercising Constitutional rights when they deprive the Negroes, as they did for so many years, of the right to vote.

Judge Leander Perez

I wouldn’t say that the Negroes have been deprived of any rights, because the Negroes have had the right to register of their own free will, sir.

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Archbishop Timothy Dolan, interview with John Burger, Catholic Register, June 24, 2011 (link here)

Dolan

They talk about us imposing our values on others. Who’s imposing on what? We have a set definition of marriage that has been part of the human endeavor from time immemorial. They’re imposing a radically new understanding of that upon something that has served as the bulwark of civilization for thousands and thousands of years.
I worry too about government intrusion. On my blog I said this seems to have a lot of traction in places like North Korea and Cuba and China. They’re used to government butting in and telling you, “We’ll tell you what your values are. We’ll tell you what marriage is. We’ll tell you what family is. We’ll tell you what human life is. We’ll tell you what a home means. We’ll tell you where you can live. We’ll tell you where you can work. That’s antithetical to everything the American project stands for. And yet that’s what we’ve got: the government now butting into the most intimate, sacred defined principles of human existence.

Burger

The irony is, in a place like China, they would never redefine marriage like this.

Dolan

Well, they redefine what human life is, see, when you think about it. If you can say the life of the baby in the womb isn’t a human life, where are you going to stop? No wonder you go to marriage. Next thing you know, they’re going to say there’s four outs to every inning of baseball. This is crazy.

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Caroline County Circuit Court Judge Leon Bazile, ordering Mildred and Richard Loving to leave the state of Virginia on charges of miscegenation, 1959. This decision led directly to Supreme Court Case Loving V. Virginia, 1967.

Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, Malay, and red and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix.

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Televangelist Pat Robertson, 700 Club, June 27, 2011 (link here)

I think we need to remember the term sodomy came from a town known as Sodom and Sodom was destroyed by God Almighty and the thing that they practiced was homosexual activity and even they tried to rape angels who came down there, so that's the kind of people they were. But beyond that, Jesus when He spoke of Sodom He didn't say anything about the homosexuality he talked about just the fact that business was as usual until God decided to destroy it. And He sent an angel down there and He said to Lot and his family, ‘get out now because I'm gonna destroy this whole area.' That's where sodomy came from, we use the term sodomy and it means Sodom. What's it like? We're heading that way as a nation. In history there's never been a civilization ever in history that has embraced homosexuality and turned away from traditional fidelity, traditional marriage, traditional child-rearing, and has survived. There isn't one single civilization that has survived that openly embraced homosexuality. So you say, "what's going to happen to America?" Well if history is any guide, the same thing's going to happen to us.

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South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, speech during campaign for President, 1948

There's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

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Columnist George Weigel, National Review Online, June 27 2011 (link here)

“Gay marriage” in fact represents a vast expansion of state power: In this instance, the state of New York is declaring that it has the competence to redefine a basic human institution in order to satisfy the demands of an interest group looking for the kind of social acceptance that putatively comes from legal recognition. But as Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York and others argued during the days before the fateful vote on June 24, the state of New York does not have such competence, and the assertion that it does casts an ominous shadow over the future. For if the state in fact has the competence, or authority, to declare that Adam and Steve, or Eve and Evelyn, are married, and has the related authority to compel others to recognize such marriages as the equivalent of what we have known as marriage for millennia, then why stop at marriage between two men or two women? Why not polyamory or polygamy? Why can’t any combination of men and women sharing financial resources and body parts declare itself a marriage, and then demand from the state a redress of its grievances and legal recognition of it as a family? On what principled ground is the New York state legislature, or any other state legislature, going to say “No” to that, once it has declared that Adam and Steve, or Eve and Evelyn, can in fact get married according to the laws of the state?

What the gay lobby proposes in the matter of marriage is precisely the opposite of this. Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality. The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness. The gay-marriage movement is thus not the heir of the civil-rights movement; it is the heir of Bull Connor and others who tried to impose their false idea of moral reality on others by coercive state power.