Posted on 04/09/2004 7:50:17 PM PDT by madprof98
Georgians don't much like being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. As if we needed more evidence of this willful backwardness, please refer to the March 31 vote by the General Assembly that will sully the November ballot with a statewide referendum to ban gay marriage.
This little piece of cultural apartheid may have been hatched in the dankest corner of the Christian Coalition's basement, but make no mistake: It took an unholy alliance of lawmakers -- Republican and Democrat, white and black, male and female, old and young -- to finally pull it off.
Far from being politics as usual, the controversy that raged over Senate Resolution 595 was a debate about hate that many gay Georgians couldn't help but take personally.
"It's very demoralizing to turn on the TV every day and be told that you're not worth anything, that your feelings don't matter," says Jack Pelham, a 42-year-old grade-school teacher in DeKalb County. "I've never thought of leaving Georgia before, but if the constitutional amendment passes, I don't want to live here."
Why is it that every time Georgia looks as if it's ready to shed its grits-and-Deliverance image, it starts to slide back into the primordial ooze that runs between such Deep South cultural backwaters as Alabama and (shudder) Mississippi?
No, make that scramble back. Fact is, Georgia's frequent status as a national embarrassment is a problem of our own making. While Georgians complain about their children's rank at the bottom of the SAT heap, they have no one but themselves to blame for electing a state school chief who believes it's her sacred duty to strike all mention of evolution from science classes.
It's our own state representatives who voted to prohibit adult women from getting their privates pierced. It was our popular, duly elected state attorney general who vigorously and successfully defended Georgia's notoriously outdated sodomy law for years.
And, of course, who can forget the excruciating flag flap?
Although Gov. Roy Barnes made enemies among various voter groups, it's accepted wisdom that the single transgression most responsible for getting Barnes bounced from office was his snatching away Georgia's totem of intolerance, the Confederate battle flag.
Barnes wasn't about to put such a nasty, divisive issue up for a popular referendum. Why was it that no halfway reasonable politician wanted to let rank-and-file Georgians decide whether their state flag should continue to advertise bigotry? Because they'd vote to keep it, that's why, and where would that leave us?
Basically, it would leave us close to where we are now: a disgrace to the South, a laughingstock to the nation, a cautionary example to the Democratic Party, a pariah to industry. We're a state bitterly divided between rural and urban, fundamentalist and rationalist. In other words, we're seriously f*cked.
Did we expect better?
In his momentary best seller, A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat, U.S. Sen. Zell Miller argues that Northern liberals don't understand the Southern mindset. Moreover, they shouldn't try.
These highfalutin Yankees, they come down here with their talk of environmental protection, gun control, a woman's right to choose -- they just don't get that we Southerners ain't having none of it, Miller contends.
"Howard Dean knows as much about the South as a hog knows about Sunday," the congressman announced on "Meet the Press" in a typical trashing of the then-Democratic front-runner.
It's discomfiting to think that Miller may be right -- that the South remains happily stuck in its own 19th-century time warp of gun-totin', God-fearing bigots -- and woe be to he who tries to lead it into the light of the modern day.
Of course, the pundits among us can point out that the whole sordid political tussle over gay marriage is part of a carefully plotted, national GOP smoke screen, a cynical ploy whose primary goal is to goose Republican voters to the polls. That, since gay marriage already is prohibited by Georgia law, it really won't result in any big changes.
True to an extent, but that analysis overlooks the psychological damage that has already been done -- and will be done to all of us before this debacle is over. And we're not just talking about being made the butt of hillbilly jokes by Jay Leno.
The Christian Coalition's contention that we're in the midst of a culture war may be more true for Georgia than it is in other regions. Because Georgia, like the wider South, has a deeply ingrained culture of discrimination that lies just beneath the surface.
It's also true that in wars, even cultural ones, people get hurt. The battle over gay marriage is no exception.
"This wasn't about party; it was about denying people a right," says Mike Horton, outreach director for the Georgia chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, the country's largest gay and lesbian GOP organization. "I've tried to understand the vote from a political point of view, but it still amounts to someone f*cking with my life."
To Jeff Graham, executive director of the Atlanta-based AIDS Survival Project, last week's vote -- beyond merely pandering to right-wing Christian constituents -- bore the sting of a hate crime.
"We really feel like we've been kicked in the stomach," he says. "It was like coming out all over again and having people say, 'You disgust me and I want nothing to do with you.'"
Graham, 39, explains that he and his partner of 15 years first thought seriously about marriage a decade ago when the Hawaii Legislature was debating the issue. Marriage suddenly seemed a realistic goal, something to be wished for. In recent years, they had been encouraged by what looked like progress.
"We think we've made such strides in Georgia -- we've got gay politicians, gay business leaders, gay church leaders," Graham says. "Then we see a vote like last week's and we realize, 'People really hate us.'"
Perhaps it was foolish to expect more.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.