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Someday Soon-Civil
Rights in America
It was the Fourth of July, a typical warm muggy
summer day in Atlanta, Georgia. Not my favorite for
running on hot pavement but that’s exactly
what I did, with thousands of others in the annual
Peach Tree Road Race. I’d come to participate
in the Men and Masculinity Conference not far away
in Athens, Georgia and was taking in the local
flavor-- in running shoes.
The Conference was put on by the then named
National Organization for Changing Men, a group of
educators, social scientists, community activists
and concerned citizens across gender, ethnicity and
sexual preference. It had a number of key
initiatives designed to move our society closer to
it’s espoused values of liberty for all, one
called The Campaign to End Homophobia. As part of
the conference participants commitment to doing
more than just “talking amongst
ourselves,” we gathered at the Federal
Building in Atlanta at the end of our sweaty run to
protest the Hardwick Decision in which the US
Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of a
Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex
in private between consenting adults when applied
to homosexuals.
As difficult as it may be for some living today
to believe the majority opinion was that the
Constitution did not confer the right of a
particular group of people in America to engage in
private sexual practices, Chief Justice Warren E.
Burger was the one to cite the “ancient
roots” of prohibitions against homosexual sex
in his reference to William Blackstone’s
description of homosexual sex as an “infamous
crime against nature”, worse than rape, and
“a crime not fit to be named.”
Author of the dissent Justice Harry Blackmun,
framed the issue as revolving around the right to
privacy. Blackmun's dissent accused the Court of an
"almost obsessive focus on homosexual activity" and
an "overall refusal to consider the broad
principles that have informed our treatment of
privacy in specific cases." In response to
invocations of religious taboos against
homosexuality, Blackmun wrote: "That certain, but
by no means all, religious groups condemn the
behavior at issue gives the State no license to
impose their judgments on the entire citizenry. The
legitimacy of secular legislation depends, instead,
on whether the State can advance some justification
for its law beyond its conformity to religious
doctrine." Seventeen years after Bowers v.
Hardwick, the Supreme Court directly overruled its
decision in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003),
and held that anti-sodomy laws are
unconstitutional.
In l986, who were we to really know we were
doing much more than tilting windmills? Even
though the first birth control clinic in the US was
established by Margaret Sanger in l914, the use of
birth control between married couples did not
become recognized as a right of privacy protected
in the Constitution until l965 in Griswold v.
Connecticut. Even then, millions of unmarried women
in 26 states were still denied birth control.
And now we are well into the 21st century and
either tomorrow, Friday, June 26, 2015 or Monday,
June 29, 2015 the Supreme Court will announce their
decision about another personal freedom and liberty
in this Land of the Free. The court is deciding TWO
things.
- Whether states can ban or not allow gay
marriage as 13 states currently do.
- Whether states must recognize gay marriages
conducted in other states.
In other words they will have addressed whether
same-sex couples have a constitutional right to
marry, meaning a state can’t block that right
regardless of popular opinion in the legislature.
They’re also expected to rule on whether
states that don’t allow same-sex marriage must
recognize unions performed in other states.
Opponents of state bans argued marriage is a
fundamental right regardless of gender, and the
14th Amendment, originally written in to give
‘due process’ and ‘equal
protection’ to enslaved African-Americans
after the Civil War, also gives gays and lesbians
equal marriage rights.
Supporters of the appellate ruling supporting
bans submitted briefs on behalf of dozens of
religious groups and Republican lawmakers including
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz of
Texas. They argued the bans are a matter of
states’ rights and were not put in place out
of animosity toward gays and lesbians.
What are those arguing for state’s rights
to curtail human freedom really arguing for? I
think history has already supplied the
answer—abundantly.
Just before Halloween a few short years ago my
partner and I were honored to be Best Man and Best
Woman at a sacred ceremony of commitment all those
family and friends attending called marriage. A
state election a few days later called it
illegal.
If the Supreme Court allows state bans in 2015,
California’s gay marriage ban would not be
restored because the legal debate over it already
ended. The U.S. Supreme Court let stand a lower
federal court ruling that declared it
unconstitutional, because those who tried to appeal
it didn’t have legal standing to call for the
enforcement of a ban. The state’s governor or
attorney general could have appealed, but chose not
to. That is not the situation in all the states
where bans have been in place.
Those of us who’ve stayed the course
through history and those generations today that
view restrictions on the rights of anyone to
establish the kind and quality of identity,
relationship and family of their choosing as
preposterous will prevail-- and maybe in a matter
of hours. Then we’ll truly have something to
celebrate with fireworks, the true spirit and
meaning of liberty in America.
©2015, Randy
Crutcher
* * *
Randy
Crutcher has over three decades of experience as a
teacher, counselor, and community
organizer/builder. He is a personal and
professional development coach, facilitator, and
consultant to both large institutions and small
organizations in the public, private, and
non-profit sectors. He has done extensive work with
men and boys to become all they can be having
opened one of the first state grant funded
men’s counseling center’s in America. He
developed programs to assist men in learning
alternatives to violence, father and son workshops
and gatherings.
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