Marriage Equality

Back when Barack Obama was born in 1961, his parents' marriage was illegal in 16 states because his mother and father were different races. That state of affairs ended when Obama was six years old, when the wild-eyed judicial activists on the US Supreme Court struck down Virginia's (and by extension the other states') anti-miscegenation law in Loving v. Virginia. The principle at stake in Loving was an obvious one, but one that conservatives have a real beef with: the notion of inalienable rights.

An inalienable right is one that a person is born with. It can't be legislated away, and the notion that such a right can be dependent on the will of the majority is an abhorrent one. In the United States, we've come to accept Thomas Jefferson's assertion that one of the roles of government is to uphold these rights. Furthermore, the government doesn't have the power to decide which of these rights to uphold and which to deny; it has to uphold them all. In Loving, the Supreme Court ruled that marriage was just such an inalienable right, and that governments had no business deciding that some couples were entitled to marry each other but others were not.

Forty years later, that view is being extended, state by state, to same-sex couples. Currently, four states grant same-sex couples civil unions offering restricted marriage rights, four more states grant same-sex couples civil unions offering full marriage rights, and two states grant same-sex couples the right to marry. Forty years after Loving, no politician can openly declare that governments should have the right to forbid interracial marriage (whatever private views they may hold). Within our lifetimes, the same will be true of opposition to same-sex marriage. The time has come for Rhode Island to affirm this inalienable right, and if I'm elected to the General Assembly, my voice will join those already calling for marriage equality in the Ocean State.

By the way, I know I've based my campaign on running to the left of everyone else, but I don't think that'll be possible in this case, because State Representative Steve Coaty's position on marriage equality is actually more radical than mine. He has stated that he wants to restrict marriage to religious organizations and limit governments to the granting of civil unions. Since marrying people is one of the traditional prerogatives of government ("by the power vested in me by the State of Rhode Island") and always has been, trying to "get the state out of the wedding business" would be as radical a move as trying to get the state out of the criminal justice business. Ironically, my own belief that we ought to keep the state's marriage laws the way they are, and just extend them to same-sex couples, is more conservative that Coaty's. I apologize. I'll try not to let it happen again.