Vice President Joe Biden will be remembered in history as in effect floating a trial balloon for the Obama administration’s support of marriage equality in May 2012 as the campaign for the November general election was just heating up. The vice president’s public statement of support for marriage equality had the effect of putting President Barack Obama in a position where his progressive base would have required him to voice what we know to be his conscience. And indeed, Obama made history by becoming the first U.S. president to declare that all Americans deserve equal rights under the law to enter into marriage.
But African Americans in particular should be aware that it was a Civil Rights Movement icon, Julian Bond, who really blazed the trail for Obama in his single most loyal, and critical, electoral base: the black community. Long before Biden stumbled onto center stage, Julian Bond had put his immeasurably credible name and face to the campaign for marriage equality. One of the many things we admire about this pioneering president is he knows that he stands on the shoulders of giants. On marriage equality, this is again the case, and gay Americans who have thanked Obama for making a stand on behalf of their rights should also thank Julian Bond.
Now Joseph Lowery and Al Sharpton have joined Bond in framing a commentary, printed in this week’s paper, that rather pointedly assumes a defensive position in respect to the many social conservatives among the high-voting elements of the black community. On a national stage, they are doing what Mayor Francis G. Slay has done for years in St. Louis: advocating for marriage equality while reminding social (mostly Catholic, in Slay’s case) conservatives that they have every right to disapprove so long as their disapproval stops short of infringing on anyone else’s equal rights. Bond, Lowery and Sharpton even take care to state explicitly that it’s Obama’s understanding that churches will reserve the right to forbid any marriage ceremonies in their sanctuaries that they do not consider sanctioned by God. In addition to respecting people’s deeply-held religious beliefs, this is a critical point to be made politically. We are talking about equal rights before the law, not the Lord.
The Rev. Fred Robinson, a black minister in Charlotte, North Carolina, provides another relevant perspective. While announcing that he opposes marriage equality, Robinson also opposes the energy being expended against it. He rightly reminds black Christians regarding Obama, “He is the president of the United States, not the pastor of the United States. America is a democracy, not a theocracy.”
Sharpton, Bond and Lowery stop just short of suggesting that African Americans fall guilty of hypocrisy if they act to deny equal rights before the law to any other minority group. Cory Booker, the brilliant, progressive, sometimes controversial mayor of Newark, New Jersey, is somewhat less restrained. Booker cuts right to the constitutional case for equal rights before the law in a country that separates the government from any church, acting – we believe – with the boldness of Obama’s conscience, a boldness that Obama himself is wise to temper going into this critical election season. Booker may be the voice of a future when our hesitation on this ticklish issue will seem as embarrassing as Jim Crow laws embarrass us now. But Obama has to be elected in 2012, not on some distant future day, and we commend him for balancing his conscience, his nation’s constitutional protections of equal rights before the law, and his need to win reelection during perilous times.
