The American journalist H.L. Mencken famously remarked that “democracy is the system which holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Nowhere does this dictum now seem more applicable than in California, where the state legislature recently voted to legalize same-sex marriage, but Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stated he would veto the law out of “respect for the will of the people.”
When Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor of California, he was supposed to be the ultimate moderate Republican: socially progressive, fiscally conservative, even a potential ally of the gay and lesbian community. Liberal hawks, like myself, hoped he might very well represent the future of the Republican Party.
How then, did this backwards state of affairs come about, in which the Governor would strike down a landmark piece of gay-right legislation passed by the elected representatives of his state on the grounds of “respecting the will of the people”? Were we duped into supporting a closet social conservative? Possibly, but it is also more complicated than that. The problem is with the system of government in the state of California itself.
In his excellent book The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria holds up California as a prime example of direct democracy run amok: a state where nearly every aspect of budget and policy is controlled by ballot initiatives, petitions and propositions, not by elected officials. Voters have come to expect to get what they want, when they want it, even if the things they demand are contradictory, like lowering taxes while increasing spending on social services.
As Zakaria puts it, “The ballot initiative movement has broken the logic of accountability that once existed between politicians and public policy.”
By ruling though propositions and initiatives, Californians have created a situation where lawmakers are no longer the sole or even the primary source of legitimacy when it comes to governing the state. Now, by choosing to bypass the legislature to get what they want, the people of California are indeed getting it good and hard.
The initiative in question here is Proposition 22: an amendment to the state constitution passed five years ago which stated that California could not be compelled to recognize same-sex marriages from other states. The purpose of Proposition 22 was to allow the people of California to decide for themselves whether or not they would recognize same-sex unions, which they now have through their elected legislators. In almost any other state, the issue would end there. Not, however, in the inverted world of California, where the people have made a practice of circumventing their own representatives so regularly that the state is nearly ungovernable.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has good reason to favour the initiative movement- it is through such an initiative that he was elected in the first place during the recall of former governor Gray Davis. But now that Arnold’s popularity has slipped to near-Gray Davis levels, he also has reason to retreat to his conservative Republican base. For both of these reasons, he chose to betray the socially liberal voters who gave him a chance in California by overriding the law of the land, and doing so in the name of “the people.”
In the ongoing debate over gay marriage in the United States, conservatives have consistently argued that it was all about stopping “activist judges.” The courts, we are told, have overstepped their bounds by making law instead of just enforcing it. That was the rationale behind the President’s proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, which would forever ban gay unions in the United States.
Now, when a state legislature does enact gay marriage, the Governor responds by threatening a veto, and demanding that the issue be resolved by the courts! Clearly, anything will do when it comes to preventing gays from achieving full equality, and it is a disgrace.
