Maggie Gallagher notes that black clergy in the Chicago area may have persuaded a critical mass of Democrats in the Illinois House of Representatives to oppose S.B. 10, which would make Illinois the 13th state to recognize same-sex marriage. The campaign for SSM in the United States routinely invokes the civil-rights movement of half a century ago; this news out of Springfield illustrates how facts on the ground clash with the idea that the two movements somehow make up a seamless garment.
The notion of SSM as the logical sequel to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 appears to be a hard sell to blacks and particularly to black pastors, the spiritual descendants of the civil-rights movement. Pew records that, among blacks, support for SSM has risen and then plateaued in recent years. In March, it stood at 38 percent. Blacks have been slower than the rest of the country to change their opinion on this issue, and their support for SSM may already be scraping against a hard ceiling.
Analogies to Jim Crow, which is what the traditional definition of marriage is equated to in a lot of pro-SSM rhetoric, are like analogies to the Holocaust: They need to be handled more gingerly than they often are. The past injustice was sui generis. Those who use it to advance disparate causes are often felt to disrespect its victims; the framing of SSM as a civil-rights issue has been effective on the whole but may actually harm the cause among those whose identity with the civil-rights movement is especially strong.
Advocates of SSM in the United States don’t have to press the civil-rights theme (their counterparts in Europe are doing fine without having that American historical context to exploit), but they do press it and now have to deal with this embarrassing symbolism, which has precedents. The Communist party in Eastern Europe was brought down by a labor movement. Norma McCorvey and Sandra Cano, the plaintiffs in Roe and Doe, the landmark Supreme Court cases that gave us abortion on demand, are pro-life. Now a social movement claiming descent from the civil-rights movement encounters resistance from its more obvious heirs.
On Friday, the deadline for S.B. 10 was extended to August 31, giving time for the Democratic party to work on those legislators who listened to the black pastors, so Illinois may end up getting SSM sooner rather than later. The pastors are less likely to change their minds than the legislators are to change their votes.