Gay Marriage and Guantánamo Bay

Reading about the Supreme Court hearings on the extrajudicial detentions of our country's non-prisoners of war at Guantánamo Bay's "Camp X-ray" (Motto: Giving High-Energy Photons a Bad Name) has got me thinking about the parallels between this case and the fight for gay marriage.

And not just because with this Administration in power it sometimes seems like we are on the verge of deporting vocal supporters of gay rights (and anyone else who annoys The Vulcans) to that little patch of Rumsfeld-land. Rather, because both cases manifest the irresistable historical force that moral philosopher Peter Singer has called the "expanding circle of concern." This idea (really more of an observation) states that the proportion of the human race that we consider to be our moral equals grows more or less continuously with time. Singer has even extended this idea to the realm of animal rights. I do not wish to tread that ground today, but I will say that I agree with his principle that the selective defense of human rights - as applying to some of our co-homo sapiens, but not to others - is in the long run indefensible.

Of course, Singer is not the only person who thinks this. Robert Wright has explored the political roots of the expanding circle and feels he can justify it on grounds of enlightened self-interest alone. And various prophets, philosophers, and religious types have held forth on the principle since time immemorial. However, very few have been willing to see it through to the bitter end. Jefferson, after all, was a slave-owner who did not even free his slave-mistress until after his death; Jesus promised to return and judge humans like sheep; Muhammed gave divine sanction to Jihad.

And now, in the young 21st-century United States, we find a large fraction of the population arguing that gays must not be allowed to marry - not even if the sovereign population of their states wants to let them - and we find our most supreme courts obsessed with splitting the ever-finer hair that separates citizens (entitled to every sanctuary of our courts and Constitution) from non-citizens (not so). In the wake of 9-11 our Justice Department identified several hundred Arab non-citizens as "material witnesses" to the crime and on that basis detained them without hearings, lawyers, or habeas corpus. Justice refused to name the detainees, or even to give their numbers; many were held in isolation for months, and there is evidence that some were brutalized. In Afghanistan, our military took 600 or so prisoners of war and declared them "enemy combatants." To be sure, they probably were that - yet according to our military, the mere application of this label somehow placed them outside the purview of both US and International Law, in an extrajudicial limbo that can only be called Rumsfeld Land (the Donald having since freed a handful of these).

The arbitrary distinctions that separate the protected - straight, citizen - from the unprotected - gay, alien - in these two scenarios are in the long run equally untenable. Already, the strains of cognitive dissonance are making the splitting of the citizenship hair difficult for anyone with a touch of moral self-awareness (thank you, Sandra Day O'Connor).

For those of us on the right side of history, then - in favor of a full expansion of the circle, to everyone, everywhere - this realization argues for confidence in our ultimate victory and the consequent vindication of our arguments. While there is no reason for complacency - human rights are after all being violated, minute by minute, day by day - the long-term perspective encourages us to ride out the inevitable short-term setbacks. Certainly, the cause of the ever-expanding circle is not limited to - and cannot be defined by - one docket before the Supreme Court, or one step forward in the cause of gay rights - even if it is an especially potent and significant one. We must stay on for the larger cause. We are in for the long haul.