
So that
sad old jackass of a Louisiana justice of the peace who'd been referring interracial couples who wanted to get married to other justices less devoted to the olden ways then himself has yielded to pressure from above and decided that he needs to spend a lot more time with his long-suffering family. Nobody who knows the good justice has accused him of not being a good guy. He is a prince, the very living embodiment of niceness and sweet reason, who would give you the shirt off his back and never steal candy from a baby or drop a sack of kittens off a bridge into the river below. All he did, after all, was voice a thought--i.e., that non-whites, whom he has nothing against, and whites should not marry because his big soft heart can't bear the possibility that their children might have hard time of it-- that would have seemed well within the bounds of majority opinion at some point in his adult lifetime.
If Justice Flapdoodle had said this as recently as forty years ago, he would have been on thin ice but not clearly and violently at odds with what the world at large agrees is permissible. He would, in fact, have touched many with the delicate way in which he couched his bigotry as an expression of concern for the children who the would-be race mixers, in their intemperate, lust-crazed indifference to the feelings of correct society, have failed to properly take into account. And indeed, many people who, while occupying much more high-profile political positions, expressed racist opinions that are much more openly vile in those years managed to keep their careers going by publicly atoning, as George Wallace did, or simply not making them anymore, as any number of prominent Dixiecrats did.
There's a period where whites can say that they don't think blacks should be allowed to live next door to them because they think they're animals. That's followed by a period where everyone understands that you can't call black people animals, but you don't want them living next to you because you think the culture shock would be too much for everyone involved, and because of that, you think the black people probably want to be protected from having the chance to live next door anyway. After the black people make it clear that they're very willing to risk that, you talk about how thrilled you'd be to have black people live next door, if only you weren't sick from worrying about how having to live around all those other white people less tolerant than yourself might affect their kids. The good justice's sin was to go on thinking what he said he believed long after the point that anyone in his position had to change his mind, or pretend to do so. When Wallace and Strom and all the rest said racist things forty or more years ago, their sentiments weren't any less racist, but they fit in with mainstream opinion at the time. It's not saying something despicable that gets you tarred as an abomination on two legs, it's not getting your despicable opinions in under the wire. With something like racial segregation, despicable opinions don't just suddenly die out overnight, they go through a process of evolution.

Yesterday, in one of those heartening reminders of the wisdom of the voters as opposed to the horrors forced on us by government decree, such as abortion rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, New York City's term limits law, and for that matter racial desegregation itself,
voters in Maine repealed same-sex legislation, overturning the state's efforts to ram a standard based on respect for basic decency down the people's throats. It was interesting to listen to the victory speech delivered by Marc Mutty, the campaign chairman of the anti-same-sex-marriage group Stand for Marriage Maine. "Let's be clear. What the people of Maine had to say was that marriage matters and it's between a man and a woman. This has never been about hating anyone, hating gays or anything. This has been about marriage and only about marriage and preserving it." In his tone, and his carefully chosen weasel words, you could hear the soon-to-be-outdated voice of the average good guy of today who, even in his moment of triumph, is backpedaling and trying to locate the latest spot where open bigotry is still socially acceptable, for now. A few years ago, a man in his position would not have felt the need to make it clear that what he was fighting for had nothing to do with hating gays, even if he didn't see hating gays as anything he ought to apologize for. And by saying that his cause has nothing to do with hating gays, he certainly cleared that up, just as Richard Nixon firmly established his innocence of any wrong-doing by taking up TV time to declare that he wasn't a crook.
What this is about, you see, is the sanctity of marriage. The sanctity of marriage, like the phrase "under God", which was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time in 1954 to shut up religious conservative idiots who wanted some Christian Kryptonite included in school children's daily patriotic routine to protect them from socialism, is one of those recent developments that people who've known about it all their lives not only regard as sacrosanct but believe that Moses must have toted it down the mountain with him after his face-to-face with Cecil B. DeMille.
The idea of marriage as a sacred institution that combines the stirring and heart-warming elements of a long-term romantic union with the practical benefits of two equal partners building a better life together than either could as a solo act--this is a relatively new thing, born of movie-fed dreams and Reagan-era celebrations of "the family" as a constituency deserving of special consideration at tax time. I could be wrong, but I don't get the feeling that people in the 1950s, the golden period that produced and inspired the pop culture upon which the idea of America as a conformist postwar golden age is founded, thought they were making America stronger and more virtuous by getting married, even if they saw marriage as something that you just had to do. Certainly nobody saw marriage that way in the divorce-happy '70s. It was the more self-aware (and, truthfully, more mealy-mouthed) '80s, a time that promoted a
Leave It to Beaver America even as a changing economy made a two-income household a virtual necessity for a comfortable life, that produced a new brand of political rhetoric devoted to recasting married families as America's Best. There's nothing wrong with that, except that it's sick-making to see people using the lie that it's been the model of marriage that everyone has been working from for centuries, just so they can claim to be protecting that ideal from attack by people who are willing to fight and march and donate money and go on Larry King and Fox News to be insulted by genetic throwbacks with bad hair, all for the right to call themselves married. Seriously, how fucked up does your relationship to the sanctity of marriage have to be to feel that your exclusivity is more sanctifying that the heartfelt petitions of people who, by the very nature of what they're doing, must surely qualify as among the romantic believers in marriage who've ever lived?
Thirty years ago, the most popular line among gay-bashers was the scary pervs had to be kept out of school teaching jobs for fear that their malign influence would turn whole classroom assemblies gay and the human race would stop multiplying and die out within a couple of generations. Is the argument that letting gays marry--marry
each other, Christ almighty, as if finding yourself a good beard and untouched life aprtner hadn't been good enough for Charles Laughton--an improvement, a step back, or is it a lateral move? That's not a rhetorical question: I honestly can't tell. But I
do think that we all have the God-given right to make assumptions about what's going on inside people's twisted hearts and understocked heads based on how unignorably stupid their stated arguments are. In a recent review of a new biography of that malignant screwhead Ayn Rand,
Adam Kirsch wrote that "if there is one thing Rand’s life shows, it is the power, and peril, of unjustified self-esteem." That's what bigotry is all about at its core, and people who are casting about for some reason to think they're better than the average person or cockroach and coming up empty can convince themselves of some jaw-dropping things, just as Rand convinced herself that her prose was readable.
Today, people who, when it was acceptable to do so, convinced themselves that it was a mark of their specialness that they had the right skin color to use the better water fountains, are today holding on for dear life to the idea that they're special because they're married, or at least have the option to get married, for the first time or again after their current spouses just can't take it anymore. These same mental giants complain that the gay people they don't hate are trying to get married so they can make marriage less special, thereby making
them less special, and the only proper answer to the question, "How in hell can this be seen as anything other than bigotry, motivated by the usual steaming mess of low self-esteem and social anxiety?", goes something like this: "Er, um, uh, ah, isthatmyphone, sorryI'vegottotakethis, okay 'bye!" Perhaps the most surprising thing about this is the tone of much of the reaction I've seen to the vote in Maine, which has taken a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger attitude towards the whole thing, perhaps on the assumption that the people fighting same-sex marriage can be persuaded to see the light so long as no one questions the goodness of their hearts and motives and talks to them in soothing tones.
I don't know how many of these people would make the same assumption about the justice of the peace in Hammond, and the arguments against same same-sex marriage are too close to the ones made against interracial marriage for anyone to need think that maybe the emotions behind it are any different. The fact is that people who oppose same-sex marriage because they're trying to prevent marriage as an institution from being "devalued" are causing unnecessary pain to other people who are doing them no harm, just because they themselves have no accomplishments to be proud of other than that, by getting married, they proved, as Alec Baldwin so movingly put it in
The Departed, that there's at least one person in the world who can stand to be around the sons of bitches. In many if not most of these cases, that might be one person too many. The Marc Muttys of this world could probably do with a little less positive reinforcement. The fate of the Hammond justice is a warning to them that they might want to use the time they've bought for themselves to start working on the attitude adjustments they'll need to continue to fit in with a world that's going to continue changing, for the better, around them.