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(registration required...I'll just copy the whole thing here)
Stolen Kisses
By BOB HERBERT
n the film "Cinema Paradiso" a priest previews each movie that is to be shown in a small Italian town and orders the removal of all kissing scenes. Near the end of the film, the main character, a man named Salvatore who had been a small boy at the time the priest exercised his powers of censorship, is given a film reel in which all the deleted kisses have been restored. He watches, profoundly moved, as one couple after another gives physical expression to their mutual love.
In the magic of movie-making we can sometimes recapture the intimacy that is lost to misguided and intolerant customs and policies. Real life is another matter.
In the United States, many people are still uncomfortable with the idea of two men holding hands (unless it's in a football huddle) or two women kissing. Sex between people of the same gender remains a major taboo. And the notion of gay marriage, viewed as an abomination by a huge swath of the electorate, is threatening to become a decisive element in the presidential campaign.
In a country that is quick to celebrate the rights of the individual and the ideals of freedom, real tolerance is often hard to come by.
One of the particularly absurd arguments against allowing gays to marry is that such a lapse would send us skidding down that dreadful slope to legalization of incest, polygamy, bestiality and so forth.
In an interview last spring with The Associated Press, Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, said we'll be on that slope if the courts even tolerate homosexual acts. Referring to the U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of a challenge to a Texas anti-sodomy law, the senator said, "And if the Supreme Court says that you have a right to [gay] consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything."
That line of thinking reminded me of a passage in Randall Kennedy's book, "Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption." In a 19th-century miscegenation case, a black man in Tennessee was charged with criminal fornication. The man's defense was that the woman, who was white, was his wife. They had been married lawfully in another state.
"That argument," wrote Mr. Kennedy, "was rejected by the Tennessee Supreme Court, which maintained that its acceptance would necessarily lead to condoning `the father living with his daughter . . . in lawful wedlock,' " and "the Turk being allowed to `establish his harem at the doors of the capitol.' " We have a tendency to prohibit things simply because we don't like them. Because they don't appeal to us. They don't feel quite right. Or we've never done it that way before. And when things don't feel quite right, when they make us uncomfortable, we often leap, with no basis in fact, to the conclusion that they are unnatural, immoral, degenerate, against the will of God.
And then the persecution begins.
I find a special irony in the high level of opposition among blacks to gay marriage.
When the U.S. Supreme Court, in the deliciously titled Loving v. Virginia case, finally ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional, 16 states, including Virginia, still had such laws on the books. That was in 1967, at the height of the war in Vietnam and three years after the Beatles had launched their spectacular assault on American-style rock 'n' roll.
In the Loving case a mixed-race married couple was charged with violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. The judge who sentenced the couple wrote:
"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangements there would be no cause for [interracial] marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
Now we're told that he doesn't want gays to marry. That there is something unnatural about the whole idea of men marrying men and women marrying women. That it's abhorrent to much of the population, just as interracial marriages were (and to many, still are) abhorrent.
We need to get a grip.
(registration required...I'll just copy the whole thing here)
Stolen Kisses
By BOB HERBERT
n the film "Cinema Paradiso" a priest previews each movie that is to be shown in a small Italian town and orders the removal of all kissing scenes. Near the end of the film, the main character, a man named Salvatore who had been a small boy at the time the priest exercised his powers of censorship, is given a film reel in which all the deleted kisses have been restored. He watches, profoundly moved, as one couple after another gives physical expression to their mutual love.
In the magic of movie-making we can sometimes recapture the intimacy that is lost to misguided and intolerant customs and policies. Real life is another matter.
In the United States, many people are still uncomfortable with the idea of two men holding hands (unless it's in a football huddle) or two women kissing. Sex between people of the same gender remains a major taboo. And the notion of gay marriage, viewed as an abomination by a huge swath of the electorate, is threatening to become a decisive element in the presidential campaign.
In a country that is quick to celebrate the rights of the individual and the ideals of freedom, real tolerance is often hard to come by.
One of the particularly absurd arguments against allowing gays to marry is that such a lapse would send us skidding down that dreadful slope to legalization of incest, polygamy, bestiality and so forth.
In an interview last spring with The Associated Press, Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, said we'll be on that slope if the courts even tolerate homosexual acts. Referring to the U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of a challenge to a Texas anti-sodomy law, the senator said, "And if the Supreme Court says that you have a right to [gay] consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything."
That line of thinking reminded me of a passage in Randall Kennedy's book, "Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption." In a 19th-century miscegenation case, a black man in Tennessee was charged with criminal fornication. The man's defense was that the woman, who was white, was his wife. They had been married lawfully in another state.
"That argument," wrote Mr. Kennedy, "was rejected by the Tennessee Supreme Court, which maintained that its acceptance would necessarily lead to condoning `the father living with his daughter . . . in lawful wedlock,' " and "the Turk being allowed to `establish his harem at the doors of the capitol.' " We have a tendency to prohibit things simply because we don't like them. Because they don't appeal to us. They don't feel quite right. Or we've never done it that way before. And when things don't feel quite right, when they make us uncomfortable, we often leap, with no basis in fact, to the conclusion that they are unnatural, immoral, degenerate, against the will of God.
And then the persecution begins.
I find a special irony in the high level of opposition among blacks to gay marriage.
When the U.S. Supreme Court, in the deliciously titled Loving v. Virginia case, finally ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional, 16 states, including Virginia, still had such laws on the books. That was in 1967, at the height of the war in Vietnam and three years after the Beatles had launched their spectacular assault on American-style rock 'n' roll.
In the Loving case a mixed-race married couple was charged with violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. The judge who sentenced the couple wrote:
"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangements there would be no cause for [interracial] marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
Now we're told that he doesn't want gays to marry. That there is something unnatural about the whole idea of men marrying men and women marrying women. That it's abhorrent to much of the population, just as interracial marriages were (and to many, still are) abhorrent.
We need to get a grip.
It doesn't hurt me so why not...? Moral decline!
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