A Noble Turn of Phrase

Sometimes a few simple words can make a difference. Perhaps the quote that echoed around around the globe and online from Minn. State Rep. Steve Simon's speech last week on GLTB equality will prove to be just such a noble turn of phrase.

Simon was addressing fellow members of a House committee tasked with deciding whether to approve a measure to put marriage equality out of reach of gay and lesbian Minnesota families by writing discrimination into the state's constitution.

A committee in the state senate had already given the anti-gay proposal its stamp of approval; the measure will be deliberated on, in name if not in substance, before, in all likelihood, both GOP-dominated chambers approve the measure and once again put the rights of gay and lesbian families up to a popular vote in 2012.

Though the committee voted to advance the measure, Simon's words resounded with a clarity and truthfulness that all the anti-gay bloviation of the past few decades, from Anita Bryant's brayings to the lunatic warblings of the National Organization for Marriage, cannot hope to match.

Simon addressed the essential inequity of the religiously-motivated bias behind the measure. He talked about being Jewish and having to observe dietary restrictions that would never be tolerated if written into civil law. (He missed the cheap political function that the measure serves, as a get-out-the GOP vote McGuffin for the next presidential election, but oh well.) And he put into just a few words a very big, very important observation that goes to the heart of the anti-gay right's fundamental argument: That gays are somehow not "natural" and not part of God's plan.

"How many more gay people does God have to create before we ask ourselves whether or not God actually wants them around?" Simon asked his fellow lawmakers.

Once a generation or so, some seemingly impregnable monolith of oppression cracks and tumbles, and there's usually a catchphrase associated with it when it happens. Jane Heap comes to mind: She was one of the American publishers of an extract from James Joyce's masterpiece "Ulysses," regarded, at the time, as obscenity. Heap, under arrest for publishing the segment in The Little Review, referenced a scene from the novel in which the hero, Leopold Bloom, watches a young woman on a beach: "Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeveless blouses, breathless bathing suits; men think thoughts and have emotions about these things everywhere--seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom--and no one is corrupted."

"Girls lean back everywhere." It's lovely, it's charged--and it's the title of a seminal account by Edward de Grazia of the fall of oppressive, artistically stifling laws.

Or what about Joseph Nye Welch's public scolding of Joseph McCarthy on June 9, 1954? "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" demanded Welch. The following December, McCarthy was censured and his reign of terror came to an end. Many respected public figures had opposed him, including Edward R. Murrow, but it's Welch's cri de coeur that echoes still.

Ronald Reagan demanded that Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev "Tear down this wall!" in 1987. A little more than two years later, in late 1989, communist essentially fell apart--and millions were freed from daily state-inflicted oppression. The reasons for the fall of the Berlin Wall are complex, and Ronnie's words probably weren't the ?????? that broke the ???????'s back, but they are the words we recollect when we think back on how, overnight, entire nations were let slip from the communist yoke. (Well, that and maybe Laurie Anderson's observation that the East Germans pouring into the Western part of Berlin all seemed eager to embrace freedom by going shopping.)

Dare we hope that history will look back on State Rep. Simon's words, uttered on May 2, 2011, as the beginning of the end for state-sanctioned theocratic oppression of tens of thousands of American families? Might we come to see those words as a beacon lighting the path to a more equitable future, as well as the epitaph to an era of casual legislative bigotry handed down by our lawmakers, our judiciary, and our own fellow citizens who think nothing of throwing our freedoms away with a mark on a ballot?

Odds are that next year, Minnesota voters will go to the polls and be presented with a public choice about the private lives and the civil rights of their neighbors, their coworkers, their relations. Could this be the watershed moment in history when America wakes up to the needless, malicious curtailing of family rights and protections that has been perpetrated under the guise of the democratic process? Could 2012 see voters reject an anti-gay ballot initiative?

(Arizona's rejection of a similar ballot initiative in 2006 hardly counts: Voters in that state had been spooked by the possibility that the poorly-worded amendment might impact heterosexuals who were shacked up outside of marriage. Once the amendment was refined so that only gays stood to lose their rights, all those cohabiting-but-hetero voters had no problem approving the measure.)

Simon's words, genuine and unpolished, would be fitting for history's great quotations. After all, what do the anti-gay crowd have to offer? "Human garbage," the infamous Anita Bryant quote? "Man on dog," the even more notorious--if laughable--Rick Santorum turn of phrase? Let's not even get into the layers of delusion, hatred, and bile so aptly summarized by the Phelps clan and their slogan, "God hates fags."

Truth has a ring to it that liars seldom approximate. Simon's words, simple and direct as they are, carry that ring. So do many fingers on the left hands of committed couples around the nation, some of them in the five states that permit marriage for all, and some of them in states where homophobia, ignorance, and fear still hold sway.

Maybe--just maybe--those gold rings will finally shine a light that melts the shadows in every corner of this great land. Maybe the immortal words that mark the beginning of a new beginning have now been spoken.