Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

A bumper sticker seen at a Tea Party convention:

Don’t mess with marriage

.

What does that mean?

If you’re not supposed to mess with marriage, why would you go ahead and tell huge numbers of couples that they can’t get married? Isn’t that messing with marriage?

The trouble with the right wing marriage pose is that it seeks to protect the institution of marriage by messing with actual marriages.

The Catholic Church has already received a substantial concession from the Washington D.C. City Council in the struggle over legislation that would grant marriage equality to all residents, regardless of sexual orientation. In order to placate the Catholic church’s lobbyists, the Council placed exemptions for religious organizations. If the law passes, churches won’t be required to treat people equally. They’ll be allowed to continue their policies of hateful disregard.

Oh, but that’s not enough for the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington D.C. The Archdiocese is now threatening to withhold services for poor people if marriage equality legislation becomes law.

The D.C. City Council has responded with a great deal more dignity than the Catholic Church seems able to muster. Council members say that if the Catholic Church wants to stop being charitable, then the City Council will simply step forward and make up the difference itself, but it will not allow any organization’s threats to interfere with the constitutional rights of the citizens of D.C.

Want to know what’s wrong with proposition 8? Ask Simon the Political Tiger.

It’s a matter of the Constitution, see. The Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law to all people. That means that the law has to give everyone equal status, without discrimination. That includes same-sex couples. If heteros get to marry, then homosexual couples need to be given that same right.

No state has the right, through its legislature or through an electoral proposition, to overrule the Constitution’s equal protection clause. Prop 8 tries to do just that – and that’s what makes it an insult not just to same-sex couples, but to all Americans who believe in the freedoms and rights that the Constitution guarantees.

In the aftermath of the long-delayed Supreme Court decision to reassert the right of all people held prisoner by the United States government to have the ancient protection of habeas corpus, there has been a lot of hand-wringing among right wing pundits about whether the USA is strong enough to handle this level of freedom. Can we deal with a society where people are not thrown into prison at the whim of political elites, they ask, with anxious wrinkles crossing their foreheads.

The short answer is: Of course we can handle it, if we, the citizens of the USA, can avoid the temptation to buck and run. The structures of American democracy are not so limp and wimpy as right wingers seem to think.

Beyond that short answer, it’s important to understand what these right wing pundits are really concerned about. They purport to be worried about the nature of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other secret torture prisons run by George W. Bush. More honestly, these right wingers are concerned by the very idea of justice, applied equally and fairly. They worry their meek little hearts about whether a fair system of justice will protect them from the people they fear.

They ask, Should the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay be allowed to have access to lawyers? However, their question really amounts to this: Should we restrict prisoners’ access to lawyers, period?

The essence of the law under the United States Constitution, which applies everywhere that the United States government has authority, is that all people, no matter what they are accused of, should have equal protection under the law. That means that if we restrict some prisoners’ access to lawyers, we are declaring that our system has the right to restrict access to lawyers for any class of prisoners, if they should happen to offend us. If we make that choice, we are choosing to upend the Constitution, and to make our legal system unbalanced and unjust.

For that reason, no, the prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay should not have their access to lawyers restricted. If we believe that justice works, we have no reason to be afraid. If we are afraid that justice does not work when applied without prejudice, we need to learn to control our fears. This is no time for right wing sissies to come along with their hands shaking, muttering that America can’t be safe unless we throw away our Constitution and the system of justice that it has established.

Get some backbone. Support justice, especially for the people you think are guilty of terrible things. If they really are guilty, a fair system of justice will find them guilty.