Guest Post by Morbo
Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. claims to be a moderate Republican. He was recently handed a perfect opportunity to prove it but dropped the ball. Maryland’s General Assembly passed a very modest gay-rights bill. Ehrlich couldn’t seem to muster up the gumption to scrawl a signature on it. Instead, he hemmed and hawed for weeks. Yesterday he vetoed the measure.
This was hardly a revolutionary bill. It would allow unmarried couples to register with the state and guarantee them certain rights – rights that straight married couples take for granted. These deal mainly with hospital visitation and the ability to transfer property among partners without paying exorbitant taxes.
Naturally, Maryland’s kook right is having kittens. When the bill’s fate was still unsettled, the Washington Post detailed efforts by homophobes who began collecting signatures to force the issue onto a ballot. They argued it would lead to gay marriage.
Actually, the legislation would have avoided a bruising fight over same-sex marriage by extending a modest set of protections to couples who want them. It was a baby step – and the response has been what the loony right does best: an hysterical overreaction.
Incidents like this expose the real agenda of the far right. Anyone who thinks the fundamentalist, “slam-a-gay-for-Jesus” crowd will stop at blocking gay marriage is sadly deluded. Their agenda is much broader than that. They will not be happy until gay people are stripped of as many civil rights as possible.
In Texas, legislators are trying to pass a law denying gays the right to be foster parents. Other states have blocked adoptions by gays. What’s next? Perhaps banning them from teaching in the public schools or seizing the children they already have. Maybe we can give them separate drinking fountains.
With the help of a friendly attorney and some creative thinking, gay people can sometimes craft legal agreements that provide some of the rights heterosexual couples get as soon as they say, “I do.” I see no reason why gays have to keep jumping through these hoops. It infuriates me that the kook right not only wants to keep this state of affairs, but in some cases take away the hoops as well.
I recently finished a book called The Affair by Jean-Denis Bredin, which deals with the case of Alfred Dreyus, the French military officer falsely accused of treason in the late 19th century. I knew anti-Semitism was common in Europe at this time, but even I was surprised to read of its virulence of it in some quarters.
I see a parallel in today’s hatred of gays by the kook right. And hatred is the proper term. What else could possibly explain a force strong enough to motivate people to oppose legislation that gives someone a legal right to visit an ailing longtime partner in the hospital? How else to explain people getting worked up over a law governing otherwise mundane property transfers?
Let’s say two men have lived together for 40 years, and one of them ends up in a nursing home. This law would give the other visitation rights. Exactly how is this a threat to straight people? In what way does this imperil “family values”? I rather think it buttresses them.
Let’s say the partner in the nursing home knows he is going to die. Assume he wants to ensure that his life-long partner gets sole possession of the house they shared for more than four decades. Why is this anyone else’s business but the men involved? How does this transfer of property erode Christianity?
I once heard a professor give a lecture about the “reptile part” of the brain — that part of our gray matter that governs our most base and primitive emotions. The reptile brain has its uses. Primitive people used it — and it was a lot bigger back then — to escape from danger.
Today we have evolved, and the reptile brain has shrunk — for most of us. I can understand Zog the caveman freaking out over the sight of a saber-toothed tiger suddenly bounding out of the brush. (Or, if you’re a creationist, a big, scary dinosaur.) Zog has an excuse for that reaction: If he fails to respond, he could end up as lunch. His modern-day counterpart has no excuse for freaking out over the sight of a lesbian couple buying a shower curtain at Target.
Yet freak out they do. I’ve heard too much vituperation from the right to believe otherwise. It comes pouring out in torrents of rage and bile so gross you know it’s coming from a deeply primitive part of the brain. There’s no rational thought, just utter, blind rage.
During the Dreyfus affair, one newspaper columnist became so angry after a court ruled that Dreyfus deserved a re-trial that he suggested the judges be seized and their eyelids cut off. Spiders, he wrote, should then be induced to eat through the judges’ eyes. Once blinded, the judges would be marched to the pillory — all of this because they had dared to side with that “dirty Jew” Dreyfus. That’s an example of the reptile brain in control.
The judges were never attacked in this manner, but sadly, thousands rallied to this insanity. Rational people sat back and grieved for their nation — but they also remained optimistic, feeling certain the day would come when France would return to its senses. Eventually it did.
I’d like to think the day will come when Americans will look back on this period of extreme homophobia and feel embarrassed. I’d like to see the reptile brain keep shrinking until it kicks in only in the case of real threat. I’d like to see it in my lifetime, but I doubt I will.
That’s why we have to pass the message on to our children, grandchildren, god children, nieces and nephews and so on: Keep fighting that reptile brain.
And as far as Ehrlich is concerned, this incident does have one benefit: It shows where he’s really coming from. A moderate would have signed this bill. Ehrlich chose to side with the kook right. Maryland legislature should override his veto.