Gay Marriage, the Left and Conventionalism

I have seen many people arguing that the victory over conservatism represented by the election of Barack Obama has been stained by the defeat of gay marriage in California, Florida and other states.

In fact, everything indicates that the same Black and Latino voters who massively supported Obama also voted against gay marriage—but note, not against the civil union of homosexuals, which will continue to exist in these states, nor in favor of the many projects submitted to referendum or vote that aimed to restrict the right to abortion and were defeated.

I think this argument is flawed for two reasons.

First, gay marriage has never been never a basic indicator of the difference between the right and the left anywhere. As Italian Norberto Bobbio said, and as history teaches, the difference between right and left is given by the belief in a minimum of social equality and justice as a prerequisite for the development of a truly democratic society.

In the United States, the political tradition of which comes from the liberal philosophers of the 18th century, this belief in the value of equality is expressed in the euphemism, so many times expressed by Obama in his speeches, of the “equality of opportunity”. This translates to, among other things, the defense of a system of more progressive taxation to “spread wealth”, as the president-elect said to Joe the Plumber in the phrase that was attacked by the McCain campaign as a sign of “socialism.”

The conservatives in the United States value above all the so-called “negative liberties”, the right of people not to be disturbed by governments or others, to the detriment of the “positive liberties”, among them the right to education, to healthcare and to work. Of course the conservatives are the first to attack the individual liberties that they say they value when the target is the enemy, whether it is the “communists” (remember McCarthyism) or “terrorists” (remember the Patriot Act under Bush).

It was the American conservatives who invented, in the “culture wars” that go back to Richard Nixon, the idea that the difference between the right and left are the so-called “moral values”. With this, they took the focus off the changes that they went on to implement in the basic structures of society, in terms of reductions of opportunities (or equality). Today, the United States has the most unequal society of any rich country.

In this sense, Obama’s victory was really a repudiation of the conservatism that has been preached since the time of Ronald Reagan that, if you benefit the top of the economic pyramid, wealth will automatically spread to its base, making government or collective action to ensure this happens unnecessary.

Second, I find the idea that gays who want to be married on paper are being intrinsically progressive very questionable.

If on the one hand there is the idea of equal rights, on the other hand they are just re-vindicating the right to be conservative, to have the “approval” of society.

I am still of the generation that thinks getting married on paper is a sign of being old-fashioned. I’ve been married for 20 years to a man I love, I have two beautiful almost grown children, and I’ve never had the patience to go down to city hall. I never thought this ritual was worth one minute of my life.