State or the Nation: Divide and Conquer

[Remember what I said about it being a good weekend? Forget it; the last 24 hours have gone far to cancel out Saturday's good time. John and me, of course, but also everyone I know is anxious and depressed, if not on the verge of total emotional meltdown. S.A.D.? Maybe, but it really seems as though a lot of sand castles people had felt were the real thing are melting away these days, and no one quite knows what to put in their place. I feel it too, and am trying my damnedest not to give in. Sometimes my resolve fails, and I give in to the shrieking, quaking horrors. It's all falling apart, and it's not ever going to get better.]

**************

[So, to take my mind off my troubles, I sink my teeth into those of the wider world. I don't care if both of my readers are sick of reading about gay marriage here; I have another bone to pick. (What's with the carnivorous imagery?) Commentators from both the right and the left seem to think that the states ought to be the places where this question is decided. The states, they say, have "always" been where marriage law is decided. States are well-suited to be something called "social laboratories" where competing sociocultural ideas can get played out, and this is good because folks in Missoula and Baton Rouge have fundamentally different values than people in Provincetown or San Francisco.]

[Bushwah. Federalism, as I've said before, is almost always a red herring used by conservatives as a divide-and-conquer tactic. People who think states are competent to decide these types of social issues don't remember the lessons of the civil rights movements of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. State lines were arbitrarily drawn in the 17th through 19th centuries, often (in the case of the western two-thirds of the country) by meddling mapmakers who had never been to the territories involved. While it's arguable that the eastern states' populations evolved into fundamentally discreet and different societies roughly defined by state boundaries (the Civil War, if nothing else, showed that), modern mobility and mass communication have eroded these boundaries to an extent that we Americans (or North Americans, if my Canuckistani friends don't mind being folded in) are much more of a piece today than we were even fifty years ago.]

[The states are simply no longer useful units for sociopolitical analysis. The real divisions today exist along urban vs. suburban vs. rural lines, along income levels, and along degrees of education. I have more in common, socioculturally, with a person of similar lifestyle, income, and education in New Orleans or Boston or Seattle than I do with your typical resident of Willows or Hesperia, California. (I was going to include racial lines, too, but I begin to suspect I have more in common with many nonwhite folks in urban areas than I do with white ones in rural areas these days; I may be wrong about that...)]

[When gay marriage reaches the federal court system, as it most definitely will, the only comparison to be made is with Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws banning interracial marriages. The parallel is so exact as to leave no room for argument, no matter the arguments about levels of scrutiny applicable to laws about race and sexual orientation. (Has anyone considered that even this Supreme Court might be persuaded, in the course of this battle, to up homosexuality to strict scrutiny? Fantasy?) Back then, people made the same arguments they're making today about states' rights. Those arguments were specious then, and they're specious now. Yes, the states still have many important things to do, and I think it's good that there are many states like California that contain diverse urban, suburban, and rural populations who are forced to mix it up. But the Bill of Rights can't have fifty different interpretations, or it's not worth the parchment upon which it's scribed. Here, the "United" is more important than the "States."]

Previously Next