MARRIAGE AND MEDIA

There may have been dancing in the streets after U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker declared California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional, but the media I viewed seemed instantly caught up in reporting that the proponents of Prop 8 were certainly going to appeal. The anchors on the major networks and cable can’t resist reporting everything like a gladiatorial fight. If someone is for, someone else must be against. If the gays and lesbians win one round, they will face defeat in the next.

What was missing in so much of the reporting I saw was any sense of the breadth of Judge Walker’s opinion. It is striking in its thoroughness. It’s Findings of Fact run over 50 pages, detailing reports of psychologists, sociologists, and historians. These findings give evidence of continued discrimination against gays and lesbians while, at the same time, affirming that same-sex couples are substantially the same as different-sexed ones. The children of same-sex couples do as well or better than those of straights. Gays and lesbians are productive members of society, but discrimination against them adds serious stress to their lives. Hate crimes against gays and lesbians have not abated, and they are often likely to be violent in nature. “Domestic partnerships” are by any measure seen as distinctively less than “marriage.” On the basis of studies in Massachusetts, there is no evidence that marriage equality for same-sex couples has affected the rate of traditional marriage, divorce, or out-of-wedlock births in that state.

You would think a few of these findings might find their way onto the airwaves, but no. The broadcasters are too interested in the really sexy issue of how quickly Judge Walker stayed his own decision and how fast the Prop 8-ers filed their appeal. That Judge Walker dismantled the internally contradictory evidence of the Prop-8 defendants is hardly mentioned, unless you are watching Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann. You know, the biased liberal media.

The larger point is this: news coverage in America is, with rare exception, superficial, biased not necessarily right nor left but in favor of conflict and sound bites, which is necessarily a reactionary mode. Those who are in the LGBT community—like those in other minority communities—learn the lesson that we can hardly expect the media to represent us credibly. Television is a visual medium: easier to get pictures of us dancing in the streets celebrating a still premature victory than to explain the rigorous argument of a U.S. District Chief Judge for the Northern District of California that “Proposition 8 is unconstitutional under both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses.” That would require explaining the meaning of those terms, the history of the 14th Amendment in which those terms are inscribed, and crediting moral weight to the LGBT movement. This last would be in contradistinction to the high-horse morality of people who pretend no animus toward gay people but do everything in their power to deny us daily dignity. Think of all those Republican Senators (Jeff Sessions, anyone?) who raked Elena Kagan over the coals because she disputed the military presence on the Harvard campus over “don’t ask, don’t tell” which was an affront to Harvard’s own LGBT anti-discrimination policies.

Oh, dear. I write all this and I don’t even think marriage is such a sacrosanct institution in the first place—but I sure can smell a rat when an option is denied me because I’m light in the loafers.

For the full decision, go to this New York Times site:
http://documents.nytimes.com/us-district-court-decision-perry-v-schwarzenegger?ref=us