Prop. 8 as the death-rattle of religious paternalism

Rather than a show of strength by the religious right, the entire movement behind Prop. 8 may very well be a last strike by a disintegrating power structure. So says author Richard Rodriguez in this great interview on Salon. (As further evidence of the disintegration of that structure, I submit today's Florida court decision, finding in favor of a gay foster couple petitioning to adopt their foster sons, and finding Florida's legislative ban on gay adoption unconstitutional.)

One of Rodriguez's key points is that, in their battle with gay marriage, churches have chosen make the sin more important than the family, have chosen to expel gays even as that expulsion breaks the family structure, both in terms of gay parents and gay children.

Here are some key portions of the interview:

American families are under a great deal of stress. The divorce rate isn't declining, it's increasing. And the majority of American women are now living alone. We are raising children in America without fathers. I think of Michael Phelps at the Olympics with his mother in the stands. His father was completely absent. He was negligible; no one refers to him, no one noticed his absence.

The possibility that a whole new generation of American males is being raised by women without men is very challenging for the churches. I think they want to reassert some sort of male authority over the order of things. I think the pro-Proposition 8 movement was really galvanized by an insecurity that churches are feeling now with the rise of women.

...The pro-8 campaign calls itself the Protect Family Movement, even though the issue of family was the very reason gays needed to have marriage. There are partners in gay unions now who have children, and those children need to be protected. If my partner and I had children, either through a previous marriage or because we adopted them, I would need to be able to take them to the emergency room. I would need to be able to protect them with the parental rights that marriage would give me. It was for the benefit of the family that marriage was extended to homosexuals.

...Now these churches are going after homosexuals as a way of insisting on their own propriety. They are insisting that they have a role to play in the general society as moral guardians, when what we have seen in the recent past is just the opposite. I mean, it's one thing for the churches to insist on their right to define the sacrament of marriage for their own members. But it's quite another for them to insist that they have a right to define the relationships of people outside their communities. That's really what's most troubling about Proposition 8. It was a deliberate civic intrusion by the churches.