We're not there yet

Shades of Governor George Wallace, the racist politician who defied the federal government’s attempts at integration in 1960s Alabama and who famously proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” History proved him wrong and will do so again to his brother-in-hatred, Alabama's chief justice, Roy S. Moore.

Moore, as you likely know, ordered local probate judges to ignore a federal court’s ruling that was to allow Alabama to start issuing marriage licenses yesterday to same-sex couples. Judge Moore has a history of ignoring the federal government and has lots of popular support in a state that doesn’t cotton well to the feds.  In 2003, he defied a federal court order that he remove a monument to the Ten Commandments that he had installed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery.

His monument was removed and, yesterday, his order was ignored, at least by some of the probate judges throughout Alabama. Same-sex couples were wed in Birmingham and Montgomery, though not in Tuscaloosa, my husband’s hometown.

George Wallace delivering his hate message (top);

Judge Moore, below. Is that chewing tobacco in his cheek?

The courts will eventually resolve this mess and I'm betting President Obama will not have to send in federal troops as LBJ did in 1964 – although I wouldn't completely rule that out. What’s of more concern to me are the attitudes beneath the surface of the same-sex marriage debate.

The brilliant Frank Bruni, in Sunday’s New York Times column "Do Gays Unsettle You? Same-Sex Marriage, Republican Scorn and Unfinished Work," worries that the deeply seated attitudes of even gay marriage supporters are not yet what we would like them to be. GLAAD, formed in 1985 as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, found in a recent Harris Poll that of people who APPROVED of same-sex weddings, twenty percent still said they would feel uncomfortable attending one.

In the more general sample 45% of respondents said they would be reluctant to bring a child to a same sex wedding and 36% said they were uncomfortable just seeing a same-sex couple hold hands.

Hold hands! As I said, we’ve got as long way to go.

To read Bruni’s piece, click here.