Addendum

Posted on February 24, 2004    Posted by John Scalzi      8 Comments

Yes, yes, I know. I’ve been tiresome about gay marriage recently. But you know, look. As soon as I got done typing the last entry, I went over to CNN’s Web page to find that our president backs an amendment to our constitution which would, if passed, be the first time our government has specifically encoded into our constitution the denial of a right to a specific class of people — a class of people who will have that right by the time this constitutional amendment would pass. Which means that for the first time, America would constiutionally deprive a specific set of its citizens of a right they already enjoy (Prohibition, while stupid, was a blanket prohibition). The thought of my country doing that — and of a president suggesting it should be done — sickens me. There is nothing more hateful or contemptuous or flat-out immoral that we can do as Americans than to deprive other Americans of their rights — rights we let other Americans have.

The fact that Bush is willing to try — and decries judicial “activism” when it was an equally “activist” act by the Supreme Court that gave him the job — has pretty much erased in my mind any lingering doubts that the man is one of the worst presidents this country has had. He’s maybe not James Buchanan bad, but he’s definitely Warren G. Harding bad — an incompetent man led by those around him and serving the interests of the few rather than the interests of his country as a whole. And even Harding didn’t have the contempt for his fellow Americans to attempt a stunt like this.

It’s hard for me at the moment to find too much humor in the idea of what Bush wants us all to do — indeed, I would say that that the end result of passing a constitutional amendment to bar gays and lesbians to marry would simply make me ashamed to be married. Not because I am ashamed that I have declared to the world my intent to live my life with my wife (really, far from it), but because it explicitly says I have a constitutional right that other Americans do not, and implicitly says that I deserve that right more than other Americans, for the simple fact I choose to love someone of the opposite sex.

Well, let me be clear about this: If a constitutional right isn’t good enough for every American citizen, I don’t see why it’s good enough for me. If this constitutional amendment were to pass, I wouldn’t be getting a divorce — but you can be damned sure that I’ll remember who it was who made the state of marriage in America a constitutional symbol of discrimination and inequality.

Update: It occurs to me that this amendment would take away my right to same sex marriage too — and yours! I talk about it here.