A diversion that flopped

Few are impressed with President George W. Bush’s renewed push for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, which has failed to pass in the Senate. It is so clearly an attempt at a diversion from the real issues at stake for people in the United States that even some conservative Republicans didn’t go along.

The vote to close debate, which required 60 votes, got only 48. For the amendment itself to actually pass, the right-wing would need 67 votes.

Katrina and Rita survivors are still in a struggle for their very lives. The war in Iraq continues its toll on Iraqis and U.S. GIs. A growing number of people in the United States face poverty as jobs and pensions are slashed. Health care has almost become a luxury in the most technologically advanced country in the world.

Lesbian, gay, bi and trans people across the country are affected by all of the above, in addition to discrimination on the job and in immigration policy, police brutality and many other horrors of capitalism.

However, as is often the case in imperialist politics, when the ruling class needs a diversion it chooses an oppressed group of people as the “problem.” In the past few years, they said it was immigrants. Yet while the struggle for immigrant rights continues, the tide of resistance in the past few months has caused the ruling class to wonder whether they’ve picked the wrong scapegoat.

It should be noted that this tide of resistance also rejected the divide-and-conquer tactics of the ruling class by joining immigrant with non-immigrant as well as the full spectrum of genders and sexualities in the struggle for full rights for all workers.

Now “activist judges” and same-sex marriage are the problem. The corporate media reports this is part of a “strategy” to highlight the Republican Party’s convictions and concrete political beliefs. (New York Times, June 7) With regard to votes in a midterm election year, some Republicans apparently believe the strategy is “important in re-energizing conservatives who have grown disaffected in the last year or two.”

What the ruling class should really be worrying about—and no doubt is, in private—are the growing masses of working people who are becoming disaffected with the entire system of imperialism.

It cannot be said often enough that discrimination against LGBT people, in any form, is unacceptable and must be struggled against in unity—particularly when it involves a democratic right such as marriage that applies directly
to economic benefits. The struggle
must be waged by an independent movement, as the Democratic leadership has made it all too clear that they will defend the right of the state to continue to discriminate against same-sex partners.

As we support the right of LGBT people to marry, we say that everyone should have the economic benefits that marriage bestows—gay or straight, documented or undocumented, married or single.