End religious persecution of gays: Overturn the ban on gay marriage

NAPLES — When Portland's Bishop Richard Malone thanked voters for overturning gay marriage, he claimed the weight of history as justification. "I want to thank the people of Maine for protecting and reaffirming their support for marriage as it has been understood for millennia by civilizations and religions around the world."

His embrace of age-old traditions and practices is misguided. History is filled with examples of people invoking age-old customs to justify odious policy. Consider the case of slavery. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney in the Dred Scott decision wrote in 1857 that tradition justified both keeping Dred Scott in bondage and overturning the Missouri Compromise.

Africans and their descendants, Taney wrote, "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order; and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. ... This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race."

SEPARATE AND INFERIOR

The tradition of holding people as separate and inferior didn't end with the surrender of the Confederacy. Racist customs, practices and laws systematically reversed the freedoms guaranteed to freed persons by the 13th and 14th Amendments and oppressive traditions were codified and applied to marriage.

In 1924, Virginia passed its Racial Integrity Act, which read in part: "It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person. ... If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they ... shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years."

In 1959, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving were punished for violating Virginia's law through expulsion from the state. The trial judge said: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. ... The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

In 1967, the Supreme Court tossed out Virginia's and what remained of 30 other states' anti-miscegenation laws, stating that distinctions between citizens because of their ancestry was "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality."

The recent Maine gay marriage ballot question arises in the wake of a Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling that a proposed separate-but-equal civil union law there would be unconstitutional, saying in part that denial of civil marital status "works a deep and scarring hardship on a very real segment of the community for no rational reason" and that there was no "relevant characteristic that would justify shutting the door to civil marriage to a person who wishes to marry someone of the same sex."

The ruling followed the jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education that overturned separate-but-equal school segregation, holding that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

QUESTIONABLE PRACTICES

Now we come to the campaign engineered by the Catholic Church in concert with a group of conservative Protestant parishes in Maine.

Using questionable fundraising practices, they financed a scurrilous political campaign appealing to peoples prurient repugnance of homosexual sex acts, implying that these would be taught in public schools.

As nonprofit stewards, pastors campaigned openly in churches that would serve as polling stations, imploring their parishes to vote in a partisan manner. Now that the campaign is over and the people have voted, we must ask ourselves, "Is the matter settled?"

The answer is, of course, no; a tyranny of the majority cannot stand. Does anyone seriously believe that a popular vote would have overturned slavery, anti-miscegenation laws, school segregation, or affirmed the right of women to vote? Hardly.

Religious persecution of gays will be overturned in Maine. In the meanwhile, persons of good conscience might consider withholding Sunday offerings to parishes whose pastors advocate the continued persecution of gays.