Judith Levine in Boston Review:
The plaintiffs who moved the Supreme Court to grant homosexuals “equal dignity” in marriage under the U.S. Constitution were the bereaved widower of a man who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, an Army lifer and his male partner, and a couple of lesbians so devoted to children that they adopted three with severe disabilities.
Like the nine African Americans whose murder in Charleston has persuaded white America finally to consider doing something about racism—“good people, decent people, God-fearing people,” President Barack Obama called the church members—they were as innocent as victims could be.
And like the families of the slain, the gay and lesbian petitioners forgive the people and institutions that have hurt them. Indeed, they “respect [marriage] so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves,” writes Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. All they want is “not to be condemned to live in loneliness”—apparently the fate of unmarried people. Yet because of “their immutable nature,” they have no option but same-sex matrimony.
In other words, these people did not choose their plight; they do not deserve their punishment. Unlike, say, the hundreds of African American bad guys killed by police every year—the guilty victims.
The morning the Court’s ruling came down, I was sitting in a frigidly air-conditioned room in a Dallas church, listening to a preacher give a motivational speech to a roomful of guilty victims. It was the annual convention of Reform Sex Offender Laws, or RSOL, a national coalition of registered sex offenders (RSOs), men currently incarcerated on sex offense convictions, and their loved ones fighting to end the U.S.’s war on sex.
Texas was a logical place to hold the gathering: the state’s sex offender registry lists 86,000 people—about 10 percent of the nation’s total.
More here.