And yet, on this evening, as I sit next to my husband--only now according to the State of Kansas by way of the Supreme Court of the United States--I feel a quite bearable, a very welcome lightness of being. It's only now, in the wake of the Court's non-decision decision, that I get what it means to not feel the threat of institutionalized discrimination, as opposed to such discrimination itself. These are two very different things--things that I have long known intellectually, but now only understand holistically.
In republican theory (small-r "republican," not the nasty big-R party version), political liberty is often characterized as "non-domination or independence from arbitrary power." This theory frequently employs the analogy of the master and slave relationship to illustrate the difference between non-domination and interference. In the latter, under a slave regime, a master may force his will upon a slave in a variety of ways, from the sting of the lash to the torture of seeing one's family sold off person by person. Such interference is clearly a barrier to true liberty, one that most everyone can understand. In our modern society, many folks complain about these interferences daily: taxes that whittle down the fruits of our labor; police that dare ticket us when we drive ten miles over the speed limit; public schools that determine what is right and wrong for our children. But in society, some interferences are inevitable. The cost of interacting with other human beings is that we sometimes have to yield to their views. What interferences we can abide we determine through the means of government; we say no to the lash, but yes to the traffic cop. To only view liberty as freedom from interference, then, is to view human nature as asocial.
To the republican, though, freedom is more than just interference, because human nature isn't asocial. Freedom is the lack of arbitrary threat, the prohibition of a dominating force. In the master-slave analogy, the slave of a benevolent master is still a slave. At any point in the slave society, that benevolence could legally turn to malevolence; non-interference could become interference. To the slave, this very threat is enough to enervate human dignity. The lash is psychological, if not physical, but that doesn't make it any less real. To the republican, true liberty is the lack of arbitrary power, which requires not the lack of social connections but a profound respect for them.
I think this best explains the feeling I have as I write this evening. I rarely felt the threat or reality of discrimination, but I strongly feel the lack of both. Whereas I woke up this morning married in the eyes of the State of Vermont and the United States, I didn't do so in the eyes of my home State of Kansas. If Leigh were to have died, or we were to have entertained adoption, I would have felt interference--a lot of it. Just because we didn't endure such interference this morning, or yesterday, or the days and months before today didn't make that lack of liberty any less salient. It simply made it nearly invisible. But today, such threats were laid bare and dispatched permanently. The Supreme Court's dismissal of that arbitrary threat of interference makes me feel like a fully-fledged citizen, an individual with genuinely equal dignity to that of my heterosexual and married friends.
To see the power of liberty's expansion to include more and more human diversity is more than welcome in a world where we too often (and often rightly) criticize the broken nature of our government. It's a sign of hope, that human nature is not fundamentally bad or good, but social. We are what we make of ourselves. And today, we made ourselves better.
I love you, Leigh, and always will. I'm proud to call you my husband, now and forever, by the power vested in us by the State of Kansas, and the United States of America.
