Why should the citizens of Rhode Island take advice on democracy and equality from a man who works for an organization modeled on medieval concepts of governance with little respect for the value of women? Of course I’m talking about Bishop Thomas Tobin and his latest statement on marriage equality:
Governor Chafee’s threat to veto a proposed referendum on same-sex marriage in Rhode Island is arbitrary and undemocratic.
Tobin made this statement in response to Governor Chafee’s suggestion yesterday that he would veto a General Assembly bill that sought to place the issue of marriage equality to a popular vote.
Looking back through the history of the United States, one is at a loss to find an instance of major civil rights reform that passed by popular vote, and the Bishop of course knows this. The Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the Constitution, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 were all legislative solutions to inequality. It is questionable as to whether or not any of these important protections for human rights would have passed if put to popular vote.
The Bishop knows this. Until this last election cycle, no state had ever passed marriage equality through the process of the popular vote. Anti-marriage equality forces used to tout this fact to argue that they had the majority of Americans on their side, (until Maine, Maryland, Washington and Minnesota in 2012.). Tobin is gambling that the Providence Diocese and the well funded NOM RI (National Organization for Marriage Rhode Island) will be able to tip the scales in a local election, further delaying full rights to LGBT persons.
Money would pour into the election from the Knights of Columbus and other LGBT hate groups with the intent of warping the vote, and even if marriage equality were to pass electorally, up to a year will have passed before such marriages will be allowed. Then of course there will be legislative options for Tobin to explore, as NOM RI fronts for the church and persuades some judge to delay certifying the results or delay the inevitable via some other legalistic sleight of hand.
Tobin is less interested in democracy than he is in abusing the system as a means to an end.
And why should Tobin be so interested in democracy? When has the Catholic Church ever embraced democracy in formulating its beliefs or actions? Arranged in the manner of a medieval government, the Pope acts as King, the Cardinals and Bishops as Dukes and Counts, and the parish priests act as noblemen and knights of the realm. No one elects their local priest, he is merely foisted upon them by the ruling hierarchy. And the local priest is always a “he.” No women are allowed within the power structure of the Roman Catholic Church, equality be damned.
When Governor Chafee suggested that he would veto legislation to place marriage equality before the voters, he was standing up for democracy. He was telling the legislature to do the job the were elected to do, not punt the issue back to the voters in a cowardly attempt to avoid taking responsibility for their decisions. Many in the General Assembly, especially those of the Senate Judiciary committee, might feel torn between their duty to their church and their duty to the citizens of Rhode Island.
They should not be.
If a legislator finds that he cannot serve the state of Rhode Island because of some deeply held religious feelings of allegiance to Bishop Tobin, then that legislator should immediately resign. Last I checked, Tobin gets one vote, just like the rest of us, because he is one person, just like the rest of us. He does not get to puppet master key politicians to enforce his anti-American, anti-Human Rights agenda anymore.
Marriage Equality is an essential and simple issue of the Human Right to marry who we love. Those who stand against this can no longer claim the moral high ground.
Well said Steve. I never understood the argument that an item such as this should be put on a ballot. Civil rights should never be left to a democratic process (aka tyranny of the majority).
What I am curious about, and have never been able to confirm, is what law on the books currently prohibits same sex marriage? From what I can tell, there’s nothing in our State Constitution, there’s no State law, and nothing in the General Marriage Requirements document published by the Dept of Health, that has any kind of requirement that the applicants for a marriage license be of different genders. Anyone know?
Here’s the revised statute: H 5015
webserver.rilin.state.ri.us/BillText/BillText13/HouseText13/H5015.pdf
The old statute seems to limit marriage implicitly. If you scroll down to page 3, lines 9-13, it says:
“(1) The female Either party to the proposed marriage resides; or in the city or town in
which
(2) The male party resides, if the female party is a nonresident of this state; or in the city or town in which
(3)”
The gendered references don’t show as struck in what I copied and pasted from the text but they are they are in the proposed statute. There is another struck reference to “bride and groom” in the current statute that has been struck in the proposed statute. There doesn’t seem to be anything explicit in the old statute preventing marriage between two people of the same sex but I think the fact that in other states, at least, there have been court decisions that have determined under similar statutes it has been determined that legislative intent and the “plain meaning” of the word marriage should be interpreted as limiting the right to heterosexual couples.
It’s a marriage equality law. I don’t know why the Journal keeps calling it a “same sex” marriage law, except for the fact that surveys have shown people are more receptive to the expression “marriage equality” than they are to “same sex”. Others may not see it but the question is more than a matter of semantics.
A question I have that no one seems to mention is what about the gendered wording of quit claim deeds. Quit claim deeds have to be written in a gendered manner with a husband and wife to keep exchanges through inheritance from going through probate and being taxed. How is that resolved when both parties are the same sex?
As someone that is totally ambivalent to this issue and absolutely annoyed that it takes center stage over our economy, maybe if it doesn’t make it out of committee again, instead of lining the pockets of politicians, advocates should put their money toward a legal challenge.
Read Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree.
Solomon was one of thousands of kids who suffered every day of his school life because others were unprepared to handle his individual differences, one being the fact that he was profoundly dyslexic and the other being that he was quite identifiably “effeminate” in his ways.
For the sin of being born, his young life was made into a living hell.
His mother, however, refused to knuckle under. Painstakingly, and largely without help, she drilled him in phonetics and in letter decoding until he had an opportunity to gain what ultimately became great fluency on his own. School was, and remained, another matter.
Far From the Tree is a collection of elegant essays about people who are not terribly much like their parents. It contains sections that deal with schizophrenia, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, transgenderism, and deafness, as well as chapters on children of rape, children who are perceived as career criminals, and even children of prodigious talent, who usually have developmental challenges of their own. Solomon’s own homosexual identity is consciously woven into the narrative, and, as he states, is the prime source of his ability to empathize.
The book is remarkably comprehensive, articulate, and wise.
But, it was perhaps Solomon’s story of his many meetings with the parents of Dylan Kleybold, one of the Columbine murderers, that shook me the most.
Many people know what Dylan and Eric Harris did on that fateful day. Do they also know that they were methodically worked on and worked over on a daily basis by their “normal” peers. Or, that some so-called elite kids had set fire to Dylan’s hair in the corridors of Columbine only weeks before?
Do most people know that Dylan’s dad and mom are remarkable people, who suffer today and every day over something over which they were as powerless as we were over Newtown?
Dear Reader, before you label me soft on unconscionable crime, consider this: We presently have an empathy deficit in this country. We have become an impatient, highly stressed environment of gun wielders and name callers. We are governed by high rhetoric and low instincts.
Consider the people whom we render invisible every day. Do you actually think that they disappear?
Their civil rights, the rights that allow them equal partnership in our society, should be honored by the rest of us to the greatest extent that our compassion will comprehend and our sense of justice will encode in law.
How, then, can anyone, particularly someone who aspires to anything called holiness, put the rights of human beings who cannot be other than they are to a vote?
Pontius Pilate did that to Jesus. And group-man, mob-man got it exactly wrong–as he always does.
Your soul truth, your conscience, should inform your political truth and your moral and ethical truths.
When it does, and I have confidence that it might, things will start to turn around.
In the meantime, bear witness.
I can’t hold parents who allow their sons to acquire an arsenal blameless.
When the Supreme Court struck down all laws against interracial marriage in 1967, the majority opposed such marriages and this right would never have been won by a popular vote. Bishop Tobin enjoys the power of a large Catholic voting block here in RI, he’s a long way from the days when Catholics were a minority that depended on equality under the law to practice their religion.
Vestiges of anti-Catholic sentiment still remain. Usually, the sentiment expressed is so subtle it can be hard to recognize. But, and this is a big “but”, this state was founded during a time when religious non-conformity was suppressed and the greatest threat to religious liberty had been the Catholic Church, for some time. Tobin has declared that the U S Constitution does not actually provide a wall of separation between church and state. In the context of U S and European history, that is a very threatening statement. It is made even more serious given the fact that a vice president and director of the Thomas More Law Center is the chosen legal counsel of the state’s bully pulpit, the Projo, for first amendment issues. Roger Williams is spinning like a lathe in his grave!