Last edited: February 06, 2005
Old Argument but with a New TargetPhiladelphia Inquirer , May 1, 2003
P.O. Box 8263, Philadelphia, PA 19101
Fax: 215-854-4483
Email: Inquirer.opinion@phillynews.comBy Jonathan Zimmerman
The Santorum flap won稚 go away. Last week, Rick Santorum made national headlines by supporting the Texas anti-sodomy law. This week, gay-rights activists released a 2001 fund-raising raising letter in which Santorum linked same-sex unions to terrorism. Like al-Qaeda hijackers, Santorum suggested, gay sex and marriage threaten the very heart of our body politic.
Although the White House has remained silent, Congressional GOP members have mounted a vigorous defense of Santorum. On Tuesday, Senate majority leader Bill Frist said Santorum葉he third-ranking Republican in the Senate羊etained 鍍he full, 100 percent confidence? of his party. House majority leader Tom DeLay praised Santorum for 都tanding on principle,? saying gay sex 砥ndermines a lot of moral questions that we have in this country.?
That痴 what white Americans used to say about sexual relations between different races. In 1929, police in Sheffield, Ala., burst into the home of Elijah Fields, an African-American man. They found him in an unlit bedroom with Ollie Roden, a white woman. Although Fields and Roden were fully dressed, they were arrested under an Alabama law that made it illegal for a white woman and a black man to marry or 斗ive together in adultery or fornication.?
A local jury convicted Fields, who was acquitted on appeal for lack of evidence: He and Roden were not seen having sex. But the courts never questioned whether the state could bar them from doing so. Like interracial marriage, white Alabamians presumed, interracial sex was a 田rime against nature? and a sin against God.
The Fields-Roden episode is recounted in Interracial Intimacies, a recent book by Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy. His book should be required reading for Rick Santorum and any other American who wants to prohibit gay sex and marriage. As Kennedy shows, every argument that we now hear against gay unions was once used against interracial ones, once called 杜iscegenation.?
The first argument against miscegenation invoked America痴 social order, which required a strict differentiation of the races. 鉄hall America remain white?? one worried physician asked a medical conference in 1924. Interracial unions foretold 途ace suicide,? the eugenic nightmare that haunted white America well into the 1960s.
Santorum sees gay sex and marriage as a threat to our social order, though to him this order rests upon 鍍he family? rather than on 鍍he race.? If we abandon our taboos on gay sex, he claims, our prohibitions against other perversions擁ncluding incest and polygamy謡ill fall by the wayside.
But why? Incest clearly injures children, while polygamy would raise a host of serious problems surrounding property rights, child custody, and more. Gay sex傭etween consenting adults, remember謡ouldn稚 change any of that.
The second argument against interracial relationships rested on religion. 鄭lmighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red,? wrote a Virginia judge in 1965, upholding the state痴 so-called Racial Integrity Act. 典he fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.?
Turn on so-called Christian radio, and you値l hear the same thing about gay sex: It violates the will of the Lord. In a less sectarian vein, Santorum simply deemed them unnatural: 的n every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality,? he said. 的t痴 not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.?
Man on dog?
The Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial marriages in 1967, so Elijah Fields and Ollie Roden would now be free to wed, if they wished. But not John Lawrence and Tyron Garner, the two men involved in the Supreme Court case testing the Texas anti-sodomy laws. They池e an interracial couple, too: Lawrence is white, Garner black. But they池e gay, so Rick Santorum doesn稚 want them to get married. He doesn稚 even want them to have sex.
I壇 ask how such opinions can gain the upper hand in a free society容xcept that we already know. It痴 happened before.
Jonathan Zimmerman (Jlzimm@aol.com), author of 展hose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,? teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth.
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