Griper Blade: Civil Unions, Marriage, and the Feds

June is now "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month." Someone call Hallmark, because we're going to need a bunch of cards. President Obama issued the proclamation yesterday, which makes it official. No one gets any new rights or privileges, but they do get a promise from Obama to "continue to support measures to bring the full spectrum of equal rights to LGBT Americans."

What are those "equal rights?" According to the proclamation, "These measures include enhancing hate crimes laws, supporting civil unions and Federal rights for LGBT couples, outlawing discrimination in the workplace, ensuring adoption rights, and ending the existing 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy in a way that strengthens our Armed Forces and our national security."

Now someone clear something up for me -- civil unions are equal to what, exactly? Not marriages, that's the whole point of civil unions. They're the compromise between the positions of marriage for all and marriage for some. Civil unions represent equality in a "separate but equal" sense. That they aren't actually marriages is the whole idea.

You could say that former vice president Dick Cheney passed Obama on the left yesterday, as he came out in favor of same sex marriage. "I think that freedom means freedom for everyone," he told the National Press Club. "As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish."

But this isn't the "man bites dog" story that the media has been trying to make it. Cheney's position is actually only slightly more supportive of these marriages and just as unsupportive of equality. "The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don't support," he continued. "I do believe that the historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis... But I don't have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that."

Of course, his grasp of history is a weak as his grasp of the laws against torture. While not a federal statute, the Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia represents federal action in states' marriage laws. Loving struck down laws banning mixed race marriages. No one sane thinks this was a bad idea anymore. This is an example of what the right calls "judicial activism," but using it as an example of bad jurisprudence would be political suicide... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]