Frank Rich; Angels in America; Making a Difference

There are days when I feel very discouraged over the status of gay rights in this country and feel the urge to give up on my activism and even this blog. Some days it just seems so hard to make a difference and the effort simply becomes exhausting. Then a ruling like the one handed down in Perry v. Schwarzenegger occurs or I read of inspiring stories of individuals who improbably step forward and made a statement for change and equality and I rally my spirits and resolve to carry on my efforts in Equality Virginia, Legends, HRBOR, blogging and other endeavors. Each of us in our own fashion need to keep up the fight so that evil doesn't occur merely because good people fail to oppose it. Frank Rich has a column that gives a much needed jump start to one's level of enthusiasm and shows that despite the set backs that occur, there are amazing people who dare to take a step forward and do what is the morally right thing to do even if it is frequently looked down upon the majority. In his latest column, Frank Rich looks at women in New York's Peabody family who took unlikely steps, the odd couple Ted Olson and David Boise and others. He also takes on the forces of anti-gay discrimination and underscores just how empty their arguments truly are. Would that more in the main stream media would decisively take on the demagogues of the right and expose their lies and ridiculous arguments to the bright light of day rather than simply provide them with a platform from which to disseminate their venom. Here are some highlights:
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Judith Dunnington Peabody, . . . died on July 25 at 80 in her apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York. . . . As the fashionable wife of Samuel P. Peabody in the decades to follow, she shared the society pages with Pat Buckley, Babe Paley and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But to quote Tracy Lord, the socialite played by Katharine Hepburn in the classic high-society movie comedy “The Philadelphia Story,” “The time to make up your mind about people is never.” In 1985, Judith Peabody, a frequent contributor to the traditional good causes favored by those of her class, did the unthinkable by volunteering to work as a hands-on caregiver to AIDS patients and their loved ones. Those patients were then mostly gay men, and, as Guy Trebay recently wrote in The Times, they were “treated not with compassion but as bearers of plague.”
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Thanks to Peabody’s prominence, her example had a discernible effect in beating back ignorance and fear in New York. But 25 years ago, few could have imagined a larger narrative that might lead to full civil rights for gay Americans. That was change almost no one believed in. Nor could many have imagined that a day would come, as it did 10 days after Peabody’s death, when a federal judge in San Francisco would rule it unconstitutional for same-sex couples to be denied the right to be lawfully wedded in sickness and in health.
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I didn’t know Peabody, but I can only imagine that her determination to make a difference was in some part influenced by her mother-in-law, Mary Peabody. The wife of an Episcopal bishop and the mother of a governor of Massachusetts, Mary Peabody spent two nights in jail, at the age of 72, after participating in sit-ins to protest racial segregation in St. Augustine, Fla., in 1964.
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The Peabody women were among the countless players in these larger civil rights dramas. They are testimony to the courage, big-heartedness and sense of fundamental fairness that can flower in our country in the most unexpected quarters even as the angrier and more malign voices dominate the debate. And sometimes over the long term — an obscenely long term in the case of black civil rights — the good guys and women can win real victories.
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Much has been said about the triumph of the odd-couple legal team, the former Bush v. Gore adversaries Ted Olson and David Boies, who opposed Prop 8 in court. But of equal significance is the high-powered lawyer on the other side, Charles Cooper. He was named one of the 10 best civil litigators in Washington in the same National Law Journal list that included Olson and, in his pre-Supreme Court incarnation, John Roberts. Yet, as Judge Walker made clear in his 136-page judgment, Cooper, for all his talent and efforts, couldn’t find facts to support his argument that full civil marital rights for same-sex couples would harm the institution of marriage, children or anyone else.
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There has already been an attempt to discredit Walker, who has never publicly discussed his sexual orientation but has been widely reported to be gay. The notion that a judge’s sexuality, gay or not, might disqualify him from ruling on marriage is as absurd as saying Clarence Thomas can’t rule on cases involving African-Americans. By this standard, the only qualified judge to rule on marital rights would be a eunuch.
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No less ridiculous has been the attempt to dismiss Walker as a liberal “activist judge.” Walker was another Reagan nominee to the federal bench, recommended by his attorney general, Edwin Meese (an opponent of same-sex marriage and, now, of Walker), in a December 1987 memo residing at the Reagan library. It took nearly two years and a renomination by the first President George Bush for Walker to gain Senate approval over opposition from Teddy Kennedy, the N.A.A.C.P., La Raza, the National Organization for Women and the many gay groups who deemed his record in private practice too conservative.
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This, like the states’-rights argument, is a replay of the battle over black civil rights. Eric Foner, the pre-eminent historian of Reconstruction, recalled last week via e-mail how Strom Thurmond would argue in the early 1960s “that segregation benefited blacks and whites and had nothing to do with racism” — as if inequality were O.K. as long as segregationists pushing separate-but-equal “compromises” claimed their motives were pure.
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Still another recurrent argument from the Thurmond era has it that no judge should overrule the voters, who voted 52 to 48 percent in California for Prop 8 in 2008. But as Olson also told Chris Wallace, “We do not put the Bill of Rights to a vote.”
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[S]ometimes we do hit that note, however tentatively. How one wishes that the many gay Americans who were left to die in the shadows during that horrific time — and, in most cases, without a Judith Peabody, let alone a legal spouse, by their side — could hear Judge Walker’s clarion call.