With the American electorate’s refusal to restore credibility at the head of the world’s most powerful governing body, the opportunity for a nation to deter itself from a current course of tragedy and disaster vaporized in the barren fields and vast skies of Ohio.
The landslide re-election of President Bush serves as an unfortunate justification of the current administration’s unjust actions over the past four years. The despair following Election Day goes far beyond the results of the presidential race, however, as Tuesday’s outcome dealt social justice a severe blow as well.
Eleven states, with the proposal of gay marriage bans on their ballots, voted to instill discrimination and bigotry into the framework of their constitutions. Some of these anti-gay marriage amendments went as far as to ban civil unions and domestic partnership for straight couples. These proposals were so radical, in fact, that many Republican leaders in these states, such as Ohio Gov. Bob Taft and Sen. Mike DeWine, opposed them.
Such overwhelming support for the adoption of prejudice into state law, combined with the re-election of a controversial neoconservative president who has made it his mission to install that prejudice into the U.S. Constitution, threatens to crash this nation’s progress into a wall of intolerance and bigotry.
Witnessing such a discriminatory display of governance in what is supposed to be the poster child for free and tolerant democracy begs the question: What is our country turning into? Such vile disregard for basic human freedoms betrays the democratic and autonomous philosophies that America was founded upon.
Arguments for oppressive laws, such as gay marriage bans, severely lack credibility and moral justification, stemming not from rational political thought but from influential religious beliefs. American leaders are obligated, as established by our forefathers, to govern based on the former, not the latter. Although we must respect the faith of citizens, we must first respect their basic human rights; to impose one’s moral beliefs upon another in a diverse and free society is itself immoral.
Such action has generated the perpetration of historic sins that have plagued our nation since its foundation. The ugly realm of racism that still curses this country has spawned an equally ugly societal flaw: homophobia. We have merely traded in one sword for another, coming close to sewing up one wound while another is ripped open, spewing fresh hatred and prejudice onto the stripes of our precious nation’s flag. Now the victim of intolerance and ignorance proves to be a different minority. For decades, we had been steadily moving in the right direction of equality and understanding. With laws restricting civil rights being added to a document that is supposed to ensure them, this election has seen America take a large and tragic step backward.
It is due to this resurfacing of bigotry that I fear we are in much more imminent danger today than we ever thought we were back in March 2003. Public mandates writing discrimination into state law and the Republicans retaining control of both houses of Congress provides a blank check to an administration that has proven its costly ambitions will not be deterred by dissention and reason. They have used illustrious public fear to sell secret agendas and erode the fundamental base of Constitutional freedoms. Making a mockery of U.S. law by transforming fundamental rights into elite privileges threatens to cause everything this country was built on to come crumbling down.
The evident injustice of these eleven states’ bigoted ratifications is an appalling development in a time of supposed compassion and liberation. Odd that we legitimize invasions as freeing oppressed people only to turn around and tear freedoms from the grasps of our very own citizens.
No doubt the Bush administration, with a second chance to win public support, will install vigorous policies hoping to transform the public’s attitude into one of unified hope. We cannot come together as a nation, however, if so many of our citizens are being deliberately and unfairly isolated. H.L. Mencken once said, “All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.”
Election Day proved to be an impeding roadblock in the path to progress. At a time of perilous hostility and escalating global violence, and in the twilight of an election decided by voters’ quest for righteousness and human dignity, I wonder: when did being anti-gay take moral precedent over being anti-war?
Adam Lichtenheld ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in political science and international studies.
