With yesterday's New Jersey Supreme Court ruling ordering the state legislature to create an institution that approximates marriage for homosexuals and requiring the extension of benefits to same-sex couples and their children, the Republicans are hoping to energize conservatives to vote for GOP congressional candidates. Desperate to distract the voters from the economy and from the quagmire in Iraq, this ruling has already been touted as an example of "activist judges" and "the imperial judiciary... "impos[ing] same sex marriage in New Jersey."
For 30 years the GOP campaigned for smaller government, for state's right and against government intrusion in people's lives. Even on the fractious issue of abortion rights, the Republicans declared the necessity of letting the individual states decide. So who are these imposters in elephant clothing who want the Feds to decide to whom states can issue a marriage license, expanding government power and spending and encouraging the US Supreme Court to overturn jury awards in state courts? (See http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/opinion/26thu4.html?th&emc=th)
While growing up in working class Cleveland in the 70s, political parties were defined in simple terms. The Democrats are for the little guy and the Republicans are for big business. Simple, clean and bereft of the left/right demarcations. Back then, Joe Everyman belonged to a union, worked in manufacturing or the trades, went to church or didn’t, made a decent living and thought a hot dog at the ball game was a gourmet meal. (Especially in Cleveland with Stadium Mustard.) Although he wasn’t the most tolerant of souls when it came to gays — he probably called them ‘queers’ — he frankly didn’t care enough about them to worry. He might have known a couple at work or from the neighborhood. But for the most part he never worried about their corrupting influence on society.
Joe Everyman was mistrustful of corporations — convinced after years of abuse that the company didn’t care about the workers — and would never call himself “pro-business.” At the same time, he was just as likely to subscribe to the philosophy of “Buy American.” Not because of xenophobia or racism, but rather because he understood that in a very real sense his economic interest was tied to the marketplace. He saw that an increasing number of goods were being made overseas and that companies were looking for cheaper labor. The line didn’t hold very long.
Soon the average family needed two wage earners and increasingly the good union jobs were being lost. By the mid-80s the steel mills, the shipyards, the foundries, the factories and the trades were laying off people in record numbers.
It was during this same period that the Republicans began to redefine the political parties. The Democrats became the party of tax and spend, the party of every crackpot issue, the party of liberals. The GOP became the party of rugged individualism — a party that preached, “if you’re poor it’s your fault” — the party of American strength and pride, the party of white, middle class ascendancy. It didn’t matter that these views were in opposition to reality any more than the old definitions did. Slick campaigning portrayed Democrats as weaklings, lackeys of big government waste.
People started to question why so many “minorities” received welfare — remember the welfare queens in their mink coats and Cadillacs (hey at least they bought American) — even though statistics showed that the overwhelming number of folks on the welfare rolls were white. The fundamental shift is best seen in the support for the White House’s union busting in the air-traffic controllers strike. Workers who favored unions were seen as obstructionists and crybabies. Stories were legion about the difficulty of getting union employees to follow even the simplest rules and firing someone was described as impossible.
What people failed to see was that supporting this reasoning, following this thinking enriched corporations but not the people. Supporting the GOP was patriotic even if the party routinely voted against middle and working class interests. To point this out, one risked the label of liberal and worse — some suggesting that to support such a position only empowered our enemies (the evil Soviets and their allies).
Each year, as real wages for the bottom two-thirds of Americans stagnated or fell, as corporate profits soared and the term “golden parachute” joined the common lexicon, the GOP became more powerful. The Republicans somehow created a dichotomy between conservative and liberal and assigned itself the former. The party further defined anything liberal as anti-American, anti-God and to blame for all the world’s ills.
Each election cycle the GOP found issues to divide the opposition into splinter groups. Minority v. white “Americanism”, urban “corruption” v. rural “heartland”, educated “elite” v. “real.” In essence these dualities always favored the rich and fractured the rest of us. The power in urban areas didn’t lie with the poor people who lived there, but rather with the suburban “carpet-baggers” who controlled employment. The educated elite were rarely in favor of an egalitarian state, rather they were enriching themselves from running the United States. The poor were painted as non-whites in spite of the numbers to the contrary.
Now it’s a liberal assault on religion and marriage that the GOP uses to frame the issues. Forget Iraq, forget illegal immigration, forget gay marriage: these issues are straw men. Implementing policies that would benefit the economic bottom nine-tenths of America are the real issues for the GOP.
The more one considers the issues, it appears Republicans are opposed to same sex marriage not on moral or legal grounds but rather for pro-business economic reasons. If homosexual unions are recognized on a federal level, businesses would have to extend benefits to same-sex partners that they currently extend to heterosexual married partners. (Sometime during the 80s the concept of common-law marriage became extinct and all marriages needed government sanction.)
The same economic impact holds true in undocumented workers. Any recognition of rights for these people would cost employers much more money than they pay now. Undocumented workers are not entitled to workers compensation, family and medical leave, overtime pay, OSHA regulations or sick time. And if workers agitate for these things they are fired and cannot seek government redress.
The government policy in Iraq is also based in enriching the wealthy — and here it is more insidious. While corporations like Halliburton are making untold millions without paying corporate income tax, the voters foot the bill. Meanwhile, well-meaning Americans suffer needless deaths and dismemberments.
GOP policy is not directed from any moral compass; it’s based on enriching the wealthiest and dividing the rest of us.
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