California: Passage of proposition banning same-sex marriage sparks protests

[IndianaGreen]

California: Passage of proposition banning same-sex marriage sparks protests

By D. Lencho and Andrea Peters
22 November 2008

In attacking the democratic right of gays and lesbians to marry, the religious right maintains that homosexuality is one of the main sources of the crisis in American society. Gays and lesbians are used as scapegoats for the fact that families are being torn apart by the disappearance of decent pay jobs, the housing crisis, the lack of affordable healthcare and the gutting of funding for public education.

This approach serves to divert people's attention from the root cause of the problems confronting working people on a daily basis—the subordination of all aspects of life to the profit motive. American capitalism has failed to provide for the needs of masses of people and to create a sustainable and healthy environment for families and children, much less foster a flowering of everyday culture. The very social and political forces leading the crusade against same-sex marriage are some of the most ardent defenders of the free market, opponents of government-funded social programs, and backers of the wholesale assault on democratic rights in the United States.

Proposition 8 passed narrowly, with only 52.5 percent of the vote, reflecting an increasingly tolerant attitude toward homosexuality within the California population as a whole. Despite this, a narrow social layer with disproportionate political influence was able to mobilize its own supporters and channel the confusion and backwardness that still exists among segments of the population into victory for this reactionary measure.

In the face of the passage of Prop 8, however, the response of the liberal establishment and their allies among leading layers in the gay and lesbian rights movement has been to conceal the larger and more fundamental political issues involved. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, the argument emerged from commentators sympathetic to the struggle for same-sex marriage that the passage of Prop 8 could be largely attributed to African-American voters who had voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama and tended also to vote for the ban on same-sex marriage.

Blacks were criticized for failing to recognize same-sex marriage as a right akin to those fought for in the civil rights struggles in the South. At demonstrations against Prop 8 around the state, signs were held aloft expressing this outlook. While this claim proved groundless upon examination of the election returns, its underlying perspective—that ordinary people as a whole are at fault for Prop 8 because of their deep-seeded prejudices, hostility to social differences, and inability to embrace "universal" love—persisted in the subsequent commentaries by public figures condemning the measure's passage.

These layers reject the fact that the passage of Prop 8 is closed bound up with the failure of the Democratic Party—whose candidate they vigorously promoted in the November 4 presidential election—to defend the democratic rights of the population as a whole, of which same-sex marriage is only one component.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/nov2008/prop-n22.shtml