Delaware’s House of Representatives voted 26-15 Thursday night to grant legal status to same-sex civil unions, giving those couples the same rights, protections and obligations now granted only to married couples.
The vote followed three hours of debate that covered a wide range of concerns — some fiscal, some related to family relations, some related to equal access to civil unions for opposite-sex couples.
When the vote was announced, the balcony — filled with supporters of the bill — erupted into cheers, applause and cries of “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”
The bill now goes to Gov. Jack Markell, who has championed gay rights throughout his public service career. Markell celebrated the passage and said he will sign the bill as soon as a suitable time and place are arranged.
What was remarkable was how big a deal this wasn’t. On the one hand, Equality Delaware is right to describe this vote as “historic” — the state took a big step toward legal equality for a group to whom that equality was previously denied. In that sense this is, as Delawarean Joe Biden would say, a big freakin’ deal.
But the general mood and prevailing response was that it’s 2011 and this step is long overdue, so let’s just get it done already. Gov. Markell’s general tone has been that of course this should be passed and signed, so let’s not dawdle over such a no-big-deal no-brainer. If opponents weren’t able to articulate a coherent argument for their opposition, he wasn’t going to waste any time trying to engage that lack of an argument.
A rally in opposition to the measure last week was sparsely attended by a crowd that showed little of the histrionic enthusiasm we saw back in 2004. The Republican leader in Delaware’s House dutifully opposed the bill, but:
… said he did not see the bill’s passage as a great loss or as a threat to society, as some opponents had warned.
“This is democracy in action,” he said. “Sometimes you win; sometimes you lose.”
The local Family Research Council affiliate went through the motions of screaming bloody murder, but even that seemed a bit perfunctory. It may seem strange to describe someone perfunctorily screaming bloody murder, but that’s more or less the sense one got as they offered a rote recitation of dire warnings of the collapse of civilization and the death of all things good and true should same-sex couples be granted the same legal rights as the majority enjoys.
Doug Napier, a lawyer with the religious right Alliance Defense Fund, was shipped in to be the point person for the sky-is-falling message. He warned of all sorts of doom and calamity if Delaware passed this law, but his zedekiad was mostly shrugged off. When he warned lawmakers that civil union legislation was a stepping stone to full-fledged marriage and eventual total equality he didn’t seem to realize that, for most of them, this was a feature, not a bug.
The problem for people like Napier or the Delaware Family Policy Council is that their Chicken Little prophecies have been demonstrated false over and over and over. By this point it’s hard to get anyone to take such warnings seriously.
When Vermont passed its civil-union law in 2000,* the Family Research Council warned that it would lead to the collapse of The Family, the end of marriage as an institution, the decline of Western civilization. They warned that the moon would turn to blood, the crops would wither and die, and that there would be pestilence, consternation and gnashing of teeth throughout all the land.
They said the same thing, in the same hysterical tone, when Connecticut passed civil unions in 2005, and when New Jersey and New Hampshire and other states followed suit.
And all the while Vermont has remained, you know, Vermont — Green Mountains, cows, maple sugar, nine months of snow, same as it ever was. None of the calamities opponents of civil unions warned of came to pass. Nothing even remotely approaching what they warned of has come to pass.
Their prophecies did not come true. They were false prophecies from false prophets.
When false prophets develop this kind of track record of being so consistently, unfailingly wrong in their dire predictions, most people stop listening to them.
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* Skimming through some old articles from 2000 about the Vermont law, when the “Take Back Vermont” backlash was so fierce that Gov. Howard Dean was urged by the state police to wear a bullet-proof vest, I came across this article by David Goodman of Mother Jones. Do yourself a favor and scroll to the bottom to read about “Rep. William Fyfe, an 84-year-old former jail warden” and “Republican state representative.”
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