And Another Thing: The Control Queen Amendment

By Carole Taylor

Once upon a time a bunch of guys in wigs got together in way too many clothes with frills and lace in a steamy back room and committed history.

No, I’m not talking about a gay bar in the 70’s. I’m talking about the guys who hammered out this really radical document which royally pissed some people off. Literally. It pissed off most of the people with power in the world, actually, because it said that one white guy (King George, by coincidence) couldn’t control the assets or rights of the entire balance of the human race. Not even just a few white guys. Now, granted, it often doesn’t seem anyone bothered to continue to pay any attention, but this country did end up with a Constitution. It took a few more tries and a few more amendments before the progeny of the authors finally allowed other human beings to be considered human beings, but that’s another story.

Rumor has it that this country, and even some others, have progressed to the point that most educated people expect basic human rights to be a given. That the pursuit of happiness should be a basic human right, that individuals, even women and even people with skin of some other color than beige, should be able to exercise free will within reasonable limits. We assume human rights to be given to each of us by the Creator and that when a government restates those rights, it is being redundant at best. Conversely, governments who expressly legislate against basic human rights have by those specific actions relinquished their moral right to govern.

We assume that paring up with someone we love is about as basic a human right as you can find. It’s certainly as basic an effort to pursue happiness as you can find. But this right is not mentioned in our Constitution. The document says nothing about the right to marry. Apparently, this basic human right is SO basic, SO given, that it didn’t occur to anyone to bring it up. I have the right to marry. And beyond that, I have the right to marry the person I love. Of course. Next?

Well, not really. For centuries, marrying the person you love wasn’t even an option, but the right to marry itself was assumed. It was just assumed that your father would broker the deal, whether he asked if you thought the guy or girl was cute was beside the point, whether he got your permission or not was beside the point. Most likely he didn’t ask. Marriage was, and world-wide often still is, an issue of property or political alliance. When kings married their first cousins, possession and control of the whole white world was kept in the family, so to speak. The theory being that France wouldn’t attack England or Germany or Russia if it meant knocking off the grandchildren. Of course, history and personal experience will tell you that your family is the very first greedy little bunch who will try to take your inheritance away from you, so marrying for political alliance and protection of property has never been an idea that has proved itself very functional. Took those white boys centuries to figure out that marrying your first cousin wouldn’t get you more land and fewer wars, it would just give your kids a head full of mismatched teeth and concerts on the back porch with dueling banjos.

Marrying for love has only been in fashion or even possible for the past hundred years or so, but since gays and lesbians didn’t exist as legal entities in law or in the public mind at all, marriage for us has never been an issue before now. WOMEN didn’t even exist as legal entities until just a few decades ago, but you really don’t want me to go there, trust me.

I’ve written about marriage before, but this past week, the issue has come up again in the news. Emboldened by the appointment of one of their own to a squeaky chair in the Oval Office, a group of conservatives (surprise, surprise) has decided to dick around with the Constitution again. Read for yourself and weep: http://www.allianceformarriage.org/

These gentle and compassionate souls want an amendment to limit who can marry whom. They fear legislation like Vermont’s civil union law and want to overturn it at the federal level. They fear legislation in foreign countries who have gone even further to allow love to be certified at Le City Hall. Those forking Europeans just won’t mind their own bidness. They make contract laws and then OUR government has to respect them. It’s infuriating having to live in a world that might make us abide by international human rights laws governed by a world court Bush can’t even make a life appointment to. Dagnabit.

I don’t know specifically the individuals who have formed this ad hoc committee, but I would bet it’s the same cadre (or their first cousins) who wanted an amendment to protect the flag from being burned. I myself was concerned about that one, gasping that on every street corner stood a 50 year-old, grizzled and whiskered hippie with his Zippo poised under the national banner. Scared the bejeezuz out of me, didn’t it you? They were everywhere, didn’t you notice? These poor old anachronisms had no time to waste, either, since you can’t drive down any street in the country without feeling that someone thinks we’re all in the throes of Alzheimer’s: If you forget where you are, just go another few feet and you’ll be able to spot a flag to discover which country you’re in. Do they do this in Europe? Is there a French flag on every building in Paris? Is anyone else as concerned about identifying the country as redundantly as Americans are?

How much you want to bet that the same people who want this anti-gay amendment are the ones who want an amendment to ban abortion under any circumstances, who want an amendment to give every white boy an Uzi….Wait. We have that one already. Next they’ll want an amendment to say that this is a Christians-only country, or try for an amendment that says this is a whites-only country.

What they want right now is an amendment to the Constitution that says that only men can marry women. No matching up of genitalia, if you please. And no fatherless families—they say that’s their goal. It’s a statement that would seem to be a particular slap in the face to lesbians who provide two mommies and an encouragement to gay men who adopt. You got TWO, count em, two, gay fathers there. Doesn’t that meet your requirements of promoting families that aren’t fatherless? The next amendment they’ll try for would be more to their real point: America for straight people only. Does anyone doubt that’s this organization’s goal?

The history of amending the Constitution has been one that expands rights. Amendments to the Constitution, with one notable exception which didn’t last due to that other human propensity for pursuing happiness, have not been efforts to limit rights. They have been added to limit the power of government. Amendments to the Constitution have been added out of the prescient knowledge of human tendencies and history. Without comment from the second highest authority, human beings will revert to their natural selves: selfish, authoritarian assholes. Bill Gates aside, the purpose and history of Constitutional amendments is that they prevent government (read that One White Guy or One Small White Guy Mob) from lording it over the rest of us, from telling all of the rest of us how high to frog, from taking away those Godde-given human rights, one at a time or in one swell foop. Amendments reiterate and codify rights. They don’t take them away.

The guys who wrote the Constitution made it hard to change the document for a reason. They didn’t trust elected officials to stop being their baser selves without the buggie whip of law to spurn them on to enlightenment They wanted to prevent individuals and even mobs from sinking to their controlling, paranoid nature.

They foresaw that Control Queens would be ever with us. She is. And she’s a Republican.

Carole Taylor holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called
"A Third Story". You can email her here.