Tyranny of the Majority

I have wanted to write this since the moment the numbers came back on Proposition 8 in California, but I wanted to keep my happy mood over the Presidential election alive for a few extra days (which turned into weeks, and then a couple of months) before I ranted on some of the negatives of Tuesday’s voting.

While walking my dog one morning not too long ago, I was listening to the most recent episode of one of many podcasts I am a fan of, The Good Atheist. During this episode one of the two hosts, Jacob Fortin, where he talked about one of his most recent blog posts, When Democracy isn’t Democratic, which just so happened to be about the very subject I had been going over in my mind. I had been thinking about how I wanted to cover this specific topic, and hearing this take on the subject gave me a few ideas of what I agreed with, and what I disagreed with (or at least felt I could covey different). I should say here, that overall I agree with Jacob’s take on the subject, even though I’m not a huge fan of his “pie” analogy, and I am quite thankful for the phrase he used in his blog post (and on the podcast) which has become the title of this entry as well as thankful for the motivation to get this post done now instead of continuing to put it off even longer.

So with that intro out of the way, I’d like to continue on with the purpose of this entry. This is how Wikipedia describes the phrase, “Tyranny of the Majority”:

The phrase tyranny of the majority, used in discussing systems of democracy and majority rule, is a criticism of the scenario in which decisions made by a majority under that system would place that majority’s interests so far above a minority’s interest as to be comparable to “tyrannical” despots.

I’d like to start off looking at this on a small scale, personal level. I would guess that at some point in just about every person’s life they have been in the minority at least once. Think back to any time when you were in the minority, for myself being a redhead I can recall times as a young kid being teased as a “carrot top” (although now I like being a redhead, even though my hair is no longer as bright red as it once was). Now imagine at that time you were in the minority, that the group had a vote on something (as in Jacob’s analogy it could be over who gets a piece of pie), and because of your minority status in that group you were excluded from whatever it was. Some people might say that in a democracy the majority rules, but being in that minority you might find the results unfair. As Jacob put it in his article:

Our intuition tells us that such a vote, even though it is democratic, is terribly unfair, because we recognize that there is no earthly reason why only 52.4% of the population should be entitled to eat it exclusively.

The 52.4% he refers to here, will become more clear shortly, but for now it is enough to say a majority, however slim or great, voted to deny you something in this scenario.

Obviously that is a very simplistic scenario, and one with little real world impact, and as such one that can be easily dismissed. So with that in mind, I’d like to lay the background out on Proposition 8, and a few analogies that I feel are more more applicable, much larger scale, much more real to life, and in fact, historically accurate assessments of our collective past.

First I think I need to supply a bit of background on how Proposition 8 came to be before we get into exactly what Proposition 8 itself it, and the details surrounding it.

For the first 127 years of California’s existence as a state in the union, marriage was defined with race and gender-neutral statutory language. When issues of race came up in 1948 the California Supreme Court declared:

Marriage is thus something more than a civil contract subject to regulation by the state; it is a fundamental right of free men. There can be no prohibition of marriage except for an important social objective and by reasonable means. No law within the broad areas of state interest may be unreasonably discriminatory or arbitrary…. The right to marry is as fundamental as the right to send one’s child to a particular school or the right to have offspring. Indeed, “We are dealing here with legislation which involves one of the basic civil rights of man. Marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race.” (Skinner v. Oklahoma, supra, at p. 541.) Legislation infringing such rights must be based upon more than prejudice and must be free from oppressive discrimination to comply with the constitutional requirements of due process and equal protection of the laws.

However this fundamental right (as the state Supreme Court put it) began to be eroded in 1977:

In 1977, the legislature amended Civil Code section 4100 (predecessor to what is now codified at Family Code section 300) to read that marriage is “a personal relation arising out of a civil contract between a man and a woman”.

But the tide did turn for a time; in 1999 and 2003 laws were passed that gave homosexual couples the rights of domestic partnership (or civil unions). San Fransisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, authorized same sex marriages in 2004, which were later annulled by the state Supreme Court after a lengthy battle. In 2005 the California state legislature passed the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act which would have recognized same-sex marriage in California, however Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the proposed act. As well in 2007, the legislature commented that the gender-specific description of marriage “specifically discriminated in favor of heterosexual couples and discriminated against, and continues to discriminate against, same-sex couples.”

Both sides gained and lost ground on the subject, over the years, with each side “winning” various battles, and suffering various setbacks, all leading up to the current situation in California today, giving the right of marriage to all people, regardless of sexuality. And so Proposition 8 came to be considered by the citizens of California:

Proposition 8 is a California State ballot proposition that would amend the state Constitution to restrict the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. It would overturn a recent California Supreme Court decision that had recognized same-sex marriage in California as a fundamental right. The official ballot title language for Proposition 8 is “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.” The entirety of the text to be added to the constitution is: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

There is much speculation as to how and why it passed, from large funding from the mormon church, to large numbers of religious black voters showing up at the polls to the “Whether You Like It or Not” ad. Personally, I don’t really care about the specifics of how it passed, I’m more interested in the mindset that the majority is allowed to trample on the civil rights of those in the minority.It is an interesting topic for those who want to delve into it further, but it’s not really the basis of my specific rant, so I won’t go down that road now, but I’m more than willing to in the comments if people are interested.

So now that you’re up to speed on where we currently stand, I’d like to get into the idea of civil rights being voted on, and why even in a Democratic society, this is a horrendous idea. To put this into perspective, we can easily look at our own history, and we don’t even have to go back too far in the past.

As recently as 1967 a number of states in the US had laws on the books that prohibited interracial marriage, that was until the Supreme Court rules in Loving v. Virginia, ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States (I’d suggest reading the link about this court case, it’s absolutely appalling what this couple went through, including the police invading their home and being sentenced to jail because they married). The trial judge in the case ruled that:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Most rational people today look at this with a mixture of horror, disgust, and anger. But this was acceptable and as is plainly obvious from the quote, was based at least in part on religious views at the time. This is not to put all of the blame on religion, in fact:

In 1966, the Presbyterian Church took a strong stand stating that they do not condemn or prohibit interracial marriages. The church found “no theological grounds for condemning or prohibiting marriage between consenting adults merely because of racial origin”. In that same year, the Unitarian Universalist Association declared that “laws which prohibit, inhibit or hamper marriage or cohabitation between persons because of different races, religions, or national origins should be nullified or repealed.” Months before the Supreme Court ruling on Loving v. Virginia the Roman Catholic Church joined the movement, supporting interracial couples in their struggle for recognition of their right to marriage.

In it’s descision on this case, the counrt ruled:

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

Now, just in case it slipped by anybody (and based on the fact that you’re a reader of this blog, I’ll assume you’re smart enough to catch it, but I’ll point it out anyways), this included: “Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival“.

Some activists believe that the Loving ruling will eventually aid the marriage equality movement for same-sex partnerships, if courts allow the Equal Protection Clause to be used. F.C. Decoste states, “If the only arguments against same sex marriage are sectarian, then opposing the legalization of same sex marriage is invidious in a fashion no different from supporting anti miscegenation laws“.

It’s an obvious comparison, and it just so happens to be the perfect comparison. If we were to have a vote to ban inter-racial marriage only 40 years ago, in many states it would have passed, and in fact in a number of states it was already the law. And yet today we have people willing to ban marriage between two consenting adults who are in love with each other, because they believe that they have the right to enforce their own religious beliefs onto others in society, because those others happen to be in the minority currently.

Jacob put it quit well on his post when he said:

We refer to this kind of injustice as the “Tyranny of the Majority”. It is the idea that in a democracy, the majorities interest can often resemble the tyranny of despots.

Most of the time, this form of tyranny is itself fairly benign. If a slim majority of citizens wants a park to be demolished in favor of more development, the results, although sad for those against the decision, generally causes little harm.

But on matters of civil rights – as was the case with Proposition 8 in California which wanted to repeal the rights of homosexuals to marry – the results are both dramatic and frightening. Here was a referendum designed to remove rights that individuals already possesses. With the Proposal having gone through during the presidential election, it will soon be impossible for any person to marry another of the same sex.

While I can argue over the merits of allowing gay couples to marry, this goes beyond that. This goes to the very foundations of who controls civil rights. To who controls the basic freedoms that we enjoy in the country. Do we want to live in a society when groups can be openly discriminated against in regards to basic rights, just because they happen to be part of a minority group? Didn’t we already go through this over the rights of minority religions? Over the rights of women? Over the rights of minority races?

We are not talking about granting a group special rights because of their minority status, we are talking about giving them equal rights under the law. One of the very foundations of this country is that ALL people are created equal. Not all white people. Not all straight people. But ALL people.

Whichever side of this particular issue you are on, think about the day when you, or your children or their children are in a minority group. Should you be discriminated against just because you’re in a minority group? Of course not. When it comes ot matters of civil rights, the Tyranny of the Majority is the wrong way to go, even if it is technically “democratic”.

Finally, I’d like to finish this post with a good take on the subject from Keith Olbermann of MSNBC: