News

Five to Four

by Josh Feit

Now that President Bush is formally calling for "the people" to overrun "activist courts" with a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, it's time for a history lesson about majorities, minorities, and the courts.

Listen to President Eisenhower in 1957: "This challenge must be met with measures [that] will preserve lawfully protected rights. Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts."

That's Eisenhower talking after nine black students, despite Brown v. Board of Education, were turned away from Little Rock Central High School by an angry white mob. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne and forcibly desegregated the school, carrying out the law as directed by the courts. Seems even a Republican in the 1950s (!!!) got it.

Almost fifty years later, as gays and lesbians in San Francisco--fortified by the recent Massachusetts court decision--push the issue of gay marriage, here's what President Bush says: "Marriage ought to be defined by the people, not by courts."

Bush--who was selected by a court and not the people, by the way--is acting more like one of the mob in Little Rock than like the presidentially-inclined Eisenhower. Bush fails to recognize that "the people" aren't typically interested in protecting the rights of the minority. That's why we have courts.

Of course, I get where Bush is coming from. He's playing to religious conservatives. Marriage, he says, is a religious institution. "Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage," he says. Bush is forgetting what the current war on terrorism is about, though. Osama bin Laden declared war on America because Bin Laden does not believe in separation of church and state.

If Bush wants to wage a credible war against al Qaeda and mullah-tocracy, he must be consistent about America's democratic values at home. That means two things: religion does not dictate the law and the courts do.

Eisenhower, with an eye on the Soviet Union's ability to exploit attacks on black school children as U.S. hypocrisy, was hip enough to see segregation in the international context. ("Our enemies are [using] this incident... to misrepresent our nation... as a violator [of] fundamental human rights," he said of Little Rock's mob violence.) Bush should have the same sense of his own backyard as he throws around America's democratic ideals in the Middle East.

And by the way, President Bush: Courts do define marriage in America. Despite the religious ceremony, you ain't hitched until you get that legal document from the government.

Speaking of which, I'd like to formally challenge King County Exec Ron Sims to start issuing some licenses. I've lined up a lovely lesbian couple, my colleague Amy Jenniges and her honey, to show up at the courthouse and escalate the grassroots challenge to Bush that S.F. Mayor Gavin Newsom started. You game, Ron? Or is the governor's race tempering your liberal values?

josh@thestranger.com