Growing up in a rural area during the 1950s as a gay man could be very difficult. Support for LGBTQ rights was far, far from mainstream, and it would be more than a dozen years before the Stonewall riots launched a formidable LGBTQ movement — and half a century before the first fully legal same-sex marriages would begin.
That's what makes the video above, from the oral history project StoryCorps, so moving. In the 1950s, Patrick Haggerty was a teen boy in rural Washington state, beginning to realize he was gay — a fact he thought he had kept well hidden. But in 1959, after Haggerty hid from his father — a dairy farmer — at school to perform in a school assembly with glitter and makeup, his father gave him some very unexpected advice: "Don't sneak."
"If you sneak, like you did today, it means you think you're doing the wrong thing," Haggerty's father said. "And if you're running around spending your whole life thinking that you're doing the wrong thing, then you'll ruin your immortal soul."
Telling your son to essentially take pride in his gayness was an astonishingly progressive position for the 1950s. According to Gallup, 43 percent of Americans in 1977 said that consensual homosexual relationships should be illegal — a number that was very likely higher two decades before. Yet in 1959, Haggerty's dad not only seemed to accept his son's sexual orientation, but actually told his son not to be ashamed of it.
But as touching as this is on a personal level, it's also the kind of advice that has advanced LGBTQ rights for the past several decades. The LGBTQ movement has long pushed pride as a cornerstone of the cause through marches, parades, and as a general message. This was not just to make people feel good about themselves — the theory was that if people were proud enough to come out to their friends and family, they could show the world that essentially anyone could be gay or transgender. And it worked: People coming out and showing the almost boring normalcy of many gay and lesbian relationships is widely credited with helping swing support in favor of same-sex marriage rights over the past few years.
Obviously, there are good reasons — personal safety, for instance — for some people to hide their sexual orientation or gender identity from others, especially in the 1950s and in countries where homosexuality is still illegal. But pride has become a crucial part of the LGBTQ movement today, which makes the position Haggerty's father took decades ago all the more impressive.
(Below are a 2 of the 12 additional items included in the SOURCE article)
A constitutional amendment passed after the Civil War is behind the battle
Since the 14th Amendment was established in the aftermath of the Civil War, it's widely misperceived to protect only racial minorities. But constitutional scholars argue that the amendment was purposely broad to protect anyone from discrimination — even groups of people who the amendment's authors couldn't possibly predict would face discrimination or one day be accepted by society.
The 14th Amendment "was designed to, really, perfect the promise of the Declaration of Independence," Judith Schaeffer, vice president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, said. "The purpose and the meaning of the 14th Amendment is to make clear that no state can take any group of citizens and make them second-class."
Schaeffer, who has studied the history of the amendment, said it was purposely written to cover groups of people in a broad manner that goes beyond race. "The authors of the 14th Amendment rejected drafts and proposals that would have limited the 14th Amendment just to racial discrimination," she said. "Instead, they put in language that protects any person — not just on the basis of race, but any person."
The amendment accomplishes this by requiring states to enforce their laws equally among all groups and not deny any group fundamental rights. In the case of same-sex marriage, states' bans violate the 14th Amendment because they purposely exclude gay and lesbian couples from marriage laws and, as a result, deny them the right to marry.
The strongest argument for same-sex marriage: equal rights for same-sex couples
Supporters of same-sex marriage argue that prohibiting gay and lesbian couples from marrying is inherently discriminatory and therefore violates the US Constitution's 14th Amendment. But there are actually two ways to look at how same-sex marriage bans may violate the 14th Amendment.
The first and most popular argument cites the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, which says states must guarantee equal protection under all laws to all groups of people. Same-sex marriage advocates argue this means states can't exclude gay and lesbian couples from their marriage laws.
The second argument cites the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause, which says that no group should be unlawfully denied a fundamental right. Marriage equality proponents argue this should prevent states from denying gay and lesbian couples the right to marry, which has been recognized by the Supreme Court in the past.
In 1967, the Supreme Court applied both of these standards in Loving v. Virginia when the court decided that the 14th Amendment prohibits states from banning interracial couples from marrying.
"This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment," Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the majority opinion at the time. "For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment."
A majority of justices at the Supreme Court concluded that very similar arguments applied to states' same-sex marriage bans, meaning that marriage is a fundamental right, the bans were discriminatory and unconstitutional, and states must carry out and recognize same-sex marriages.
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