For most of the past decade, only a delusional man could have believed the following sentences:
- The Pope, in a hundred-and-eighty-page encyclical addressed to “every single person on the planet,’’ described climate change as one of the world’s most pressing moral, ethical, and religious challenges.
- In California, which last year registered its largest number of measles cases since 1995, and the worst rate of pertussis since 1958, the state legislature Monday passed the strictest mandatory vaccination law in the country—which, pending the governor’s signature, will eliminate all exemptions other than those based on medical need.
- Despite more than fifty Congressional attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court last week upheld one of its central provisions: the ability of the federal government to provide subsides to people who cannot afford to pay.
- After a decades-long struggle that even devoted activists often doubted would succeed, the Supreme Court last week ruled that no two people can be prevented from marrying because of their gender or sexual orientation.
Until recently, I would have considered any one of those statements more a hopeful fantasy than an obtainable fact. Yet over the past two weeks all of them became true. And so did this: A New Jersey jury decided that a group of therapists had committed fraud for promising “gay conversion therapy,” a dishonored theory which had long been recanted even by Robert L. Spritzer, its best known advocate.
Journalists have a habit of trying to package four or five unrelated events as a meaningful trend. And perhaps this planet has just gone through a few anomalously thoughtful weeks. But I cannot help wondering if these developments, while seemingly unrelated, suggest that rational thought might be making a bit of a desperately needed comeback.
I know—America is still a country in which a racist gunman can wander into a church, listen to a Bible-study meeting, then pull out a gun and begin to murder people. And that happened just one city away from where, earlier this year, a white police officer was videotaped shooting an unarmed black man in the back. (Nor was North Charleston the only city where crimes like that occur.) But it is at least a relief to see that politicians throughout the South, shamed by the shootings, have begun to take down the Confederate flag. (Walmart, Target, and other chains have also finally agreed to stop selling one of the country’s principal symbols of slavery, racial oppression, and hatred. And, as Jelani Cobb points out in this week’s magazine, that is what the Confederate flag is. People may claim it as a legitimate part of their heritage. But that heritage was never legitimate, as the Civil War and the civil-rights movement ought to have amply demonstrated.)
All these decisions should have been reflexive, because they are all so obviously right. But that doesn’t matter to most people, nor does the fact that the Pope, who in many areas adheres to tenth-century notions of justice, is far more insightful and humane about the inevitable impact of climate change than the current leadership of the United States Congress.
As James M. Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, so subtly put it, “Let the Pope stay with his job and we will stay with our job.” But it’s hard to invoke morality and religion in opposing abortion, as Inhofe and so many of his colleagues do, and then tell the Pope that he ought to leave science to the scientists. Republican Presidential candidates, in particular, seem to have fallen into a deep morality trap. Rick Santorum, a devout Catholic and possibly the most avid opponent of abortion among the many Republican candidates, often invokes the moral power of the Pope’s position on the issue. But when it comes to climate change the former senator from Pennsylvania says this: “The climate does indeed change over time,’’ but it’s crazy to think that man is “somehow the tip of that tail that wags the whole dog.”
Much to the consternation of nearly all these candidates, gay life has been transformed in the decades since an unknown virus started killing thousands and then tens of thousands of men in New York, San Francisco, and other American cities. It was an epidemic of death, but also one of hatred. From the early nineteen-eighties, I covered AIDS for the Washington Post. I watched men die and then saw their lovers and those who took care of them denied even the right to attend their funerals. It was one of the darkest periods of modern American life. Gay activists, like Larry Kramer, first struggled for their medical rights, then for their basic human rights—then, seemingly impossibly, for their right to unite legally with whomever they chose. Last week, finally, in a stroke both banal and profound, the Supreme Court of the United States, governed largely by conservatives, agreed that they have that right.
If it took the AIDS epidemic to help alter American attitudes toward gay men and lesbians, and a measles outbreak earlier this year at Disneyland to make legislators see the power of vaccines, maybe it’s not too much to hope that one day soon even the most hidebound among us will begin to acknowledge how climate change will affect us all.
The Pope, of all people, has taken a giant stride in the right direction—the rational direction. Who knows? Maybe Jeb Bush or Scott Walker will be next.
