Sometime today, the House of Representatives will vote on on H.J. Res 88, an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America that would prevent people from getting married by making it unconstitutional for states to pass laws legalizing marriage of same-sex couples. Religious right wing activists are getting all hot and bothered urging members of Congress to support this attack on marriage rights. In truth, however, the vote will have little functional importance, given that the United States Senate has already rejected the same amendment.
Ah, but the right wingers are not interested in using this vote to pass legislation that actually does something. All they want is to force members of Congress through a fundamentalist Christian litmus test, a kind of examination in which any representative who fails to obey America’s evangelical Christian preachers will be labelled politically incorrect. Terrified of the political power of America’s right wing reverends, a large number of Republican representatives have already signed up as cosponsors of this shameful amendment.
Looking at this record of cosponsorship, a troubling pattern emerges. There is an ideological link between rejection of equal marriage rights for all adult Americans and the effort to bring back the days of Jim Crow and racial segregation. Earlier this month, 33 Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, a piece of legislation without which the end of racial segregation in the South would not have been possible.
So, what is this coalition of bigotry doing with the H.J. 88? They’re overwhelmingly supporting it. We’ll have to wait until later today to see how all of them actually vote, but 82 percent of this group of pro-segregation Republicans have also cosponsored the Republican anti-marriage amendment.
Republicans like to say that bigotry on the basis of ethnicity and bigotry on the basis of sexual orientation is not the same thing. The voting behavior of the Racist Gang of 33 shows us a different picture.
