From Asian Week

Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

by Phil Tajitsu Nash

Friday, September 28, 2007

On September 18th, Maryland's highest court upheld a Watergate-era state law banning civil marriage of same-sex couples. They reversed a lower court that previously had ruled for the 19 gay men and lesbians seeking a government-issued marriage certificate (not the right to be married in a religious ceremony). In doing so, the Court of Appeals ruled that limiting marriage to a man and a woman does not discriminate against gay couples or deny them constitutional rights.

Chief Judge Robert M. Bell's dissent accusing the 4-3 majority in Conaway versus Deane of failing to recognize gay people as a "suspect class," a group that, like racial minorities, warrants special protection from discrimination. Bell dismissed the majority's view that gays are politically empowered and therefore should not be viewed as such a class.

The legal defeat was heartbreaking both because it set back the cause of marriage for same-sex couples, but also because it perpetuated the taint of inferiority and second-class status that the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) communities have endured for years. While not ruling against any future efforts in the state legislature to pass bills that recognize marriage for same-sex couples, the Court of Appeals said that the state law defining marriage as between a man and woman has the "legitimate interest" of promoting child-rearing in traditional households.

For Asian Pacific Americans, the court's decision raises questions about how much protection we and other minorities will receive from the law as we get more "politically empowered." How will that threshhold be defined? By whom?

And was the notion of "politically empowered" simply another coded phrase (like "I support state's rights" instead of "I hate minorities"), so that the Justices could say they were not homophobic while their actions forced gays to continue in their second-class status?

One thing that gives me hope as I assess this situation is that whenever courts use loosely-defined terms such as "traditional households," they are both defending the current social order and opening the door to change. What is considered "traditional" today might not have been defined as such years ago.

On March 31, 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. that should give heart to those who were saddened or angered by the Maryland High Court's recent decision. The most-quoted section of that speech is "We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Yet, there are other phrases and concepts in his speech that also are well worth remembering at this time.

By March 1968, Dr. King had gone way beyond the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. He was an outspoken advocate of peace and justice, and also a foe of militarism. He was not afraid to ask why we were spending $500,000 to kill one enemy soldier in Vietnam, but only $53 per year to help one American in the so-called War on Poverty.

Dr. King started his March 1968 speech by telling the story of Rip Van Winkle, the man who went up to a mountaintop to sleep and who awoke twenty years later to find that much had changed. Even a picture of King George the Third of England had been replaced on a sign with a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. Rip literally had slept though a revolution.

"One of the great liabilities of life," said Dr. King, "is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution." Those who choose to sit on the sidelines today while their LGBT sisters and brothers continue to suffer clearly fall into this category as well.

For Dr. King, the ongoing development of technology, weaponry and human rights were the key issues of his time. Speaking to those who would sleep though a revolution, in his era or ours, he said, "Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."