Funny how quickly things change, even things once considered carved in stone.
Ten years ago, Georgia Republicans were thrilled to put a constitutional ban on gay marriage on the statewide ballot. Sure, it amounted to an act of crass political expediency at the expense of a persecuted minority group, but if the proposal drew conservative voters to the ballot box to approve it, who cared?
Like many cynical appeals to the worst in human nature, it worked — the measure passed with 76 percent of the vote. But time passed, human hearts changed, and today that provision has become a bit of an embarrassment. It’s time the thing was stricken from the books, just as Jim Crow was stricken from the books. Unfortunately, as with Jim Crow, it will apparently take federal courts to force Georgia to do the right thing, the constitutional thing, the American thing.
In a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court this week, lawyers for seven gay Georgians argue that the state’s ban on gay marriage violates both the equal-protection and due-process requirements of the 14th amendment. As the suit points out, “The marriage bans inflict serious and irreparable harms upon same-sex couples and their children that cannot be explained by reference to legitimate governmental interest.”
Two of the plaintiffs in the case, RayShawn Chandler and Avery Chandler, are officers in the Atlanta Police Department. They met while undergoing training in the police academy, and Avery is also a sergeant in the Army Reserve. They want to have children. The suit points out that thanks to the Georgia Constitution, if “Avery were killed in the line of duty as a police officer, RayShawn and their hoped-for children (unlike different-sex spouses and their children) would not qualify for state survivor’s benefits.”
That’s just plain wrong, and plain hateful, and it’s just one example of many inequities created by the law. As the suit notes, such bans serve one purpose and one purpose only:
“The marriage bans brand lesbians and gay men and their children as second-class citizens through government-imposed stigma and promote private bias and discrimination by instructing that same-sex relationships are less worthy than others. The marriage bans reflect moral disapproval and antipathy toward lesbians and gay men.”
Again, a lot has changed in the 10 years since Republicans were so eager to use gay marriage as a political weapon. In a statewide poll conducted by the AJC last fall, 48 percent of Georgians said they support gay marriage, while just 43 percent oppose it. Among Georgians aged 18-39, almost two-thirds support the right of their gay friends to marry.
It’s also telling that when the legal challenge was filed this week, top Georgia Republicans didn’t rush to defend the law with emotional tirades about federal intervention, sanctity of the family, etc. I suspect that they’ll be quietly happy to see the federal courts do what they themselves should do, if only they had the courage.
In the meantime, however, Attorney General Sam Olens, a Republican with larger political ambitions, is going to be forced to defend the law in federal court. He hasn’t shied from publicity in the past — when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments against Obamacare, for example, Olens made sure that he was right there in the Washington courtroom. He has tried to make the battle against “federal overreach” into state affairs a hallmark of his tenure as AG.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt he’ll take a similar high-profile approach to this latest fight. This is still Georgia, but it’s not 2004.
