Taking it personally

I’m over the worst of my post-election mourning but even though the disappointment and disbelief are lifting, I’m still left with a sad feeling that's just lingering on.

The post-mortem analysis that I’m reading makes a lot of the increased turnout among Christian evangelicals, and people who reported in exit polls that “moral values” was their primary issue. “Moral values” is being interpreted by liberals as code for gay marriage, and whether or not that’s exactly true, a significant part of that increased turnout was undoubtably driven by the anti-gay-marriage amendment propositions that were on the ballots in eleven states. Of course, that’s exactly why they were on those ballots, to drive up the evangelical vote. Every one of those eleven anti-marriage amendments passed, and all by healthy margins. I believe that I read that with the exception of Oregon, they all passed by at least a 2-to-1 margin; several passed by 3-to-1 margins, and in Mississippi, it passed by an incredible 6-to-1 margin.

The lesson to take from this is that the gay marriage issue is a useful one for scaring up (and I use that expression deliberately) Republican voters, and therefore we can expect to see anti-gay-marriage amendments on more state ballots in the future. Combined with the 2-4 Supreme Court appointments that Bush will make during his second term, civil rights for gay Americans have effectively been put on hold for a while.

Those civil rights will come in the end, of course, because polling also tells us that young Americans could give two shits about preventing gay people from getting married, and my experience with college students confirms this; the difference in attitude toward gays between the college students I interact with now, and the attitudes I encountered when I was in college (which was not THAT long ago) is truly striking. But these things take place in the context of human lifetimes, so if you want to get married and particularly if you want to raise children, timing counts.

I honestly don’t expect gay issues to be especially important to straight people when they go to vote and god knows, I am not a good candidate for Big Gay Martyr status myself. None of the high profile gay legal issues really affect me personally right now – I work in a generally tolerant field and hell, I’m not even dating, much less contemplating marriage or children.

But recent events require me to acknowledge that, whatever the short-term practical outcome, I hold a secondary legal status in America. And because in these days right after the election, politics is a little like sports or weather, I’m expected to talk about it casually.

I share an office with a Republican, I’m friends with a couple, and I’m related to a bunch. So now that the election’s over and it didn’t go my way, I have to talk to them about politics without being a dick or a crybaby or a bad sport. Politics shouldn’t spoil personal relationships, after all, right? As much as I might like to drop guilt-bombs like, “Hey, hope your tax cut was worth my human rights,” I can’t do that because I know the story’s more complicated than that (and liberals love complexity!) and anyway it’s just not cricket.

Gay people and black people understand about “passing”and what it costs. Now, again, the world is asking us to pass by pretending not to take it personally, that hey, it’s just politics. I can do that because there’s really no other way. But I don’t have to enjoy it.