Again With the Countermobilization Myth

While I was away, any number of conservatives who either honestly or passive-aggressively oppose gay marriage tried to sell the idea that the New York Court of Appeals’ upholding of New York’s discriminatory marriage law was really a victory for the side that lost. This argument is familiar from Roe v. Wade, about which it is frequently argued that it would be better for reproductive freedom if abortion was banned in a couple dozen states rather than legal in all 50 because…look, it’s Halley’s Comet! In addition to Roe, the false friends of gay rights are also bringing Brown v. Board into it. As Amanda says, this is silly:

The NAACP tried the legislative route before they started the lawsuit strategy when they tried to get Congress to pass anti-lynching laws, which Congress didn’t do until like last year, when they could be sure it would be only a symbolic gesture. If court decisions seems to cause more social chaos, it’s only because the courts are often the only branch of the government that can really lead the way in securing rights.

Right–the argument that Brown v. Board was counterproductive is transparently wrong in two respects. First of all, it’s not that civil rights litigators wouldn’t have preferred that Congress pass civil rights legislation, but with the Senate effectively fulfilling its designed historical role of giving an effective veto to Southern white supremacists, strong civil rights legislation wasn’t on the table. They went to the courts because that was the only option. (What are you going to do, lobby the Alabama legislature?) And second, it’s silly to treat Brown and the Civil Rights Act as independent events. Without the violent resistance engendered by Brown, which slowly made the willingness of moderates to accommodate Southern apartheid untenable, the Civil Rights Act would never have been passed. Some institution had to force the violent nature of Jim Crow into the open, and it was the courts or nothing.

And there’s an additional glaring contradiction in this argument. J-Pod et al. are arguing, remember, that winning victories in the courts means a huge setback for the cause that wins. But less than five years after Brown Congress passed its first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, and within a decade the CRA had been signed into law. I’m not sure exactly what the Supreme Court’s intervention slowed down. (Do these people think that without Brown, Dwight “southerners were not bad people, just concerned lest their sweet little girls be seated alongside some big black bucks” Eisenhower would have rammed comprehensive civil rights legislation through Congress?) If this is the pace of progress we could expect in light of a backlash to court decisions protecting gay rights, I’ll take it.

And finally, this juxtaposition should remind us why reactionaries have such a large stake in the erroneous assertion that Roe led to realignment and the creation of the New Right, when in fact the passage of the Civil Rights Act was the decisive event. (It wasn’t 1976 when the Deep South first went Republican.)

…Pierce further shreds J-Pod’s revisionist history. The extent to which people are willing to distort history to prop up the countermobilization myth is really quite remarkable, and it’s especially obvious with civil rights because (unlike with abortion) most people know the basic history.