Now,
I doubt Lopez has read Nevius’ article and
joined the Civil Liberties Union. He’s on mission
and will probably never stop advocating against the ‘sinful
ways’ of gays. But while it’s possible he got
where he is on his charming personality alone, I suspect
he’s smart and knows something about social history.
He must realize how this will eventually play out in the
federal courts, even if the court of public opinion and
a few politicians are late to the game.
So,
why, especially with a name like Lopez, isn’t he more
sensitive to civil liberties and minority issues? Maybe
it’s the Tony Soprano in me, but when I think about
how Italian-Americans were treated in America at the beginning
of World War II, I get pissed off. I want to find a guy
like Paulie Walnuts and send him to the “place ”
to see “our friend” and do the “thing.”
When,
from the floor of the senate on January 28, 2004, Senator
Russ Feingold reminded me and every other American that
“during World War II, the U.S. Government designated
more than 600,000 Italian-born and 300,000 German-born U.S.
resident aliens and their families as ‘enemy aliens,’”
and that “unknown numbers of German Americans, Italian
Americans, and other Europeans Americans had their property
confiscated or their travel restricted, or lived under curfews,”
I again promise myself that I will do what I can to make
sure that doesn’t happen again.
Does
Lopez truly believe his values trump the rights of entire
communities? Is he so far removed from history that he doesn’t
care?
Granted,
it’s not 1942 and Benjamin Lopez is, for the moment
at least, as un-subversive as Jennifer Lopez. But if it
were 1942, no one — especially the likes of the politicians
he calls friends today — would give a damn what he
believes.
In
fact, quite the contrary, to some his name alone would have
offered sufficient proof of his mental and physical inferiority
and reason enough to take him behind a barn and turn him
into a human fajita.
If
he also had the misfortune to fall in love with a white
southern belle, marry her, and attempt to live in Virginia,
for example, he would likely have been imprisoned.
Consider
what happened to a couple named Loving long after
‘42. In June of 1958, Richard Loving, a white man,
fell in love and married Mildred Jeter, a “Negro”
woman, in the District of Columbia. Shortly after their
marriage, the Lovings returned to their home state of Virginia
with hopes of living happily ever after. But in October
of 1958, the Grand Jury of the Circuit Court of Caroline
County issued an indictment, charging the Lovings with violating
Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages.
In
January of 1959, the couple pleaded guilty to the charge
and was sentenced to one year in jail. The trial judge suspended
the sentence for 25 years, however, on the condition that
the Lovings leave Virginia and not return for those 25 years.
As
if banishment from the home they loved wasn’t enough,
the trial judge stated the following in his opinion: “Almighty
God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red,
and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the
interference with his arrangement there would be no cause
for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races
shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
The
very God that Lopez invokes daily to quash the civil liberties
of the gay and lesbian community would have been summoned
and used against him quicker than he could think of a metaphor
for “Get me the fuck out of here!”
The
faces in government have changed, the landscape has changed,
but the language of today’s conservatives is frighteningly
similar to yesterday’s bigots. It’s the language
of calculated bigotry, where contempt is cloaked nicely
in terms like “sanctity of marriage” and “family
values” — terms that society must embrace or
risk being accused of becoming what it’s told it must
disdain.
For
as far back as there are public records, there’s
proof of some white guy telling a non-white guy that he’s
inferior from the top of his head to the bottom of his soul.
And some of the worst offenders in history were within our
own judicial system.
With
the constitution in one hand and a bible in the other, judges
called interracial marriage “unnatural,” “sick,”
“deplorable,” and a “perversion.”
They claimed such marriages would be a “threat to
society” and bad for the family. They insisted that
the children resulting from such marriages would be “irreparably
harmed.”
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