President Obama’s support of gay marriage may change few minds, may hurt as much as help his re-election chances, and carries no force of law.
But his support of a sexual minority’s rights – and marriage is as much about property rights as it is about love – is another affirmation of 250-year-old Enlightenment ideas that percolate through the Ethan Gage adventures.
Ethan is no intellectual, and my swashbuckler plots focus on action, treasure, and eccentric inventions. There is no sermonizing.
Yet our hero struggles to find his moral compass in the great tides of history unleashed by the ideals of the American and French revolutions and loosed upon Europe by Napoleon’s armies.
The French codified 18th Century philosophic ideas in their 1793 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Article 1 states “Men are born free and equal in rights,” and the document identifies such rights as “natural,” echoing the American Declaration of Independence. It also called for freedom of speech and the libertarian idea of “freedom to do everything which injures no one else.”
This was a radical idea then and remains a radical idea to some people today. A majority – including the sexual majority of heterosexuals – is always tempted to impose its preferences on a minority, including homosexuals. We can see that in public votes in state after state banning gay marriage, even though it means gay domestic partners are deprived of the rights of inheritance and property that married couples enjoy.
But the Enlightenment idea of equality, so strange in the age of kings, continues to batter away at our instincts like waves against a cliff. Obama’s slow evolution on the equivalency of gay marriage is yet another example.
None of this ever comes easily or smoothly. The rights proclaimed in America and France were for men only, and the French declaration omitted discussion of slavery then common in the colonies. While the Declaration helped set off the slave revolt in Haiti that is the center of The Emerald Storm, a revolutionary promise of freedom was revoked under planter pressure, and Napoleon sought to reinstate slavery there, in part at the urging of his wife Josephine, the daughter of Martinique planters.
He failed in Haiti, making it the first successful slave revolt in history.
That victory was in 1803, but it hardly settled things. Slavery and serfdom was commonplace in most of the world. Despite the 1776 and 1793 Declarations, still ahead were the 19th Century revolutions in Latin America to shuck off Spanish peonage imposed on Indians, America’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, the Russian Revolution to end serfdom, the Chinese Communist revolution to lift the peasants, and so on, some of these replacing one tyranny with a new one.
It takes a long time for an ideal to become an instinct. It was nearly 150 years after the Declaration of Independence that American women got the vote, and nearly 200 years later that blacks got the Civil Rights Act.
Like many Americans – polls suggest it is now a slim majority – my own attitudes toward gays have evolved as they have identified themselves and turned out to be, gosh, ordinary people: friends, bosses, colleagues, relatives. That high school teacher I admired? Gay. Best landlords we ever had? Gay. The inspiring editor? Gay. It’s that personal contact that makes a difference.
I don’t believe people choose to be gay any more than they choose to be black or white, male or female; we are what we’re born as, for better and worse.
In The Emerald Storm, Ethan encounters revolution at its most violent but also blacks who turn out to be, gosh, ordinary people. Haiti took the French revolutionaries at their word, sought freedom, and paid terribly for it. It’s a little-known chapter of a long Enlightenment struggle that is still going on.
Equal rights? Gosh, what a concept! Obama’s endorsement was overdue.
