This Wednesday, a momentous event occurred in the history of gay rights in America. The Supreme Court, in a split 5-4 decision, struck down the Federal Defense of Marriage Act – the Clinton-era law that prohibited the federal government from recognizing state-sanctioned, same-sex marriages – and California’s Proposition 8, the 2008 voter initiative that banned same-sex marriage in the Golden State.
In hindsight, the high court’s ruling will likely be seen as something of a turning point in the battle for gay rights in the same way Brown v. Board of Education is seen as a critical decision in the struggle over civil rights today. Victory signifies not the beginning of the end, but, to paraphrase Churchill, the end of the beginning in the struggle for gay equality.
This is because the rulings on Wednesday did not extend freedom to marry a person of one’s own gender throughout the entire country. Instead, they rolled back a voter initiative funded by the notoriously homophobic Church of Latter Day Saints that enshrined bigotry and religious ideology into California law while extending the mantle of federal protection and recognition over same-sex marriages in states where the practice is already legal and practiced.
Legally and politically, then, advocates of same-sex marriage have established a firm, impregnable beachhead from which to approach same-sex marriage reform in the rest of the country. Slowly but surely, same-sex marriage will inevitably become the law of the land in the same way that interracial marriage, even in places like Mississippi and Texas, is considered normal today. They may not acknowledge it, but the opponents of gay equality have already been defeated.
Cultural revolution
This is largely due to the remarkable shift in public opinion on the topic of same-sex marriage that has occurred within the last decade and a half. From overwhelmingly opposing it to now firmly supporting it, the public’s flip-flop of its views on homosexuality, rights for gays and lesbians, and same-sex marriage has changed in the blink of a political eye. The Supreme Court, therefore, was in many respects merely mirroring the public by reflecting in its decisions a cultural transformation that has already taken place.
The story of this transformation – which stretches from the establishment of the first U.S. gay-rights organization, the Mattachine Society in 1950, to today — can be found in Linda Hirshman’s wonderful history of the gay movement, Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. In it she documents how gay activists, fueled by the optimism of the civil rights movement and the relative safety provided by enclaves of progressive culture in our major cities, came out – first in dribs and drabs but then in a flood after the AIDS crisis – surprising and then reassuring friends, family, neighbors and coworkers.
Since gays and lesbians could be found in all populations, walks of life and regions of the country, once “out,” they swiftly went from being an invisible, easily demonized minority to flesh-and-blood human beings with lives, stories, triumphs and tragedies all their own. Human empathy, combined with America’s open culture and political system, did the rest. Simple fairness and the power of reason to defeat prejudice and bigotry made Wednesday’s outcomes — along with future victories — foreordained.
While all this is true, it should be noted that the gay revolution, like the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and other peaceful struggles by traditionally subordinated groups have all taken place relatively recently and only in certain locations worldwide – from about 1945 onward in the United States and the rest of the advanced industrialized world. For most of history, and indeed in much of the rest of the world to this day, the default status for these groups now liberated in the West has been tyrannical oppression by state and society. What made post-war America, and the rest of Western civilization — for all its faults — so special? Why there and nowhere else?
Out of the darkness
The best explanation for this can be found in the work of Ronald Inglehart, a University of Michigan academic who for decades has charted the course of cultural change in societies around the world via his World Values Surveys. Inglehart postulates, via Marx, that economic, political, and cultural change go together in a predictable manner which, taken as a whole over time, lead to the wholesale liberalization of society.
The argument goes that as people become more secure in their physical person, material existence, and station in life, they go from being totally dependent on their immediate neighbors and cultural group to being fully realized individuals who no longer need to be so intimately tied to their local culture. Thus liberated from the iron grip of society, they are left free to pursue whatever endeavors makes them happiest or, in the words of pop psychology, self-actualized. Think Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs applied to an entire society rather than a single person.
To see how this works, consider a poor, developing-world village or a European village during the Dark Ages. Life, to say the least, is hard. Food is scarce and is produced only after extended periods of mind-numbing, back-breaking labor. Armed marauders exist outside the village and may descend to engage in rape, pillage and plunder, at any time. Deadly disease is endemic and the lack of basic sanitation and modern medicine means even a simple injury can result in death or a permanent maiming. Knowledge of the natural world, and how to survive in it, is based on superstition and the results of trial-and-error that have long-since been codified into cultural tradition.
In this environment where life is, as Hobbes says, “nasty, brutish, and short,” one is intimately dependent upon the people in your immediate community. Without their knowledge, protection and labor, you would quickly perish. Thus, adhering to group cultural norms, belief systems, deemphasizing the worth and rights of the individual, and mistrusting outsiders ranks high on your list of priorities, for to do otherwise risks everything. The desperate, ignorant poor of the village, in other words, cannot afford progressive enlightenment because a single mistake could have deadly consequences.
Over time, as the village is incorporated first into a functioning state and then into large, national economies, the individual’s core dependence on the village, on the parochial community values one is born into, erodes. The state provides protection, and so loyalty is first transferred to that. With peace and stability provided, markets, commerce and industry provide a means of sustenance beyond that of the village and dependence on one’s neighbors. Finally, with peace, security and prosperity, human knowledge accumulates in the form of science and technology. All of this, combined with the inexorable power of logic and reason, eventually challenges preexisting social orders and the belief systems that support it.
A universal idea
At each step in the process the individual demands more accountability from government while at the same time demanding liberation from society – producing political democracy, free markets, and a more open, liberalized culture. Since all good things go together, a feedback loop is created wherein more peace and prosperity feed the demand for liberalized institutions and culture which, in turn, strengthen peace and prosperity. Within a few generations society can go from being relatively oppressive, poor, and backwards to prosperous, secure, and free due to the right underlying conditions.
The United States and the rest of the West had just the right conditions for much of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though mass societal liberalization was nearly derailed by two World Wars and a Depression, the stability that emerged after 1945 proved fertile enough ground to keep the process going. Indeed, it is no surprise that the first in what was to become a string of “rights” movements – the African-American Civil Rights movement – began in the years just after the ending of World War II. The rest, as they say, is history.
More to the point, this is not just American or Western history, either. The same process is playing itself throughout the rest of the world as other societies become wealthier and more developed. The Arab Spring and today’s protests in Turkey and Brazil can be seen as manifestations of a generation of young people, raised in an atmosphere of relative peace and prosperity, reaching out to challenge parochial vested interests and engrained cultural dogmas that have grown oppressive and outdated. From Selma to Stonewall and Paris of 1968 to Tahrir and Taksim Squares today, what we see are people yearning, against the accumulated dead weight of tradition, to be free.
This means that progressive liberalism is not merely a Western idea or, more cynically, solely a tool of Western cultural imperialism. It is instead a product of long-term cultural change brought about by economic development itself – something Marx himself foresaw in the nineteenth century when he noted that under market-based, capitalist development,
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Often times this dissolving away of tradition brings forth a great flowering of liberty – as seen in the rights revolutions in the West – but the chaos unleashed by this process can not only be dizzying, but terrifying, too. People with much invested in the traditional way of doing things will often resist, violently, to retain the status quo and their position in it. As can be seen in the West’s own history, the battle between cosmopolitan liberalism and parochial conservatism is a constant one that never truly ends as the frontlines are ever pushed forward by empowered individuals seeking both freedom and self-actualization.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News editorial policy.