Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote a detective story in which the clue was a dog that didn’t bark. I’d likewise say the outstanding non-event of the 2006 session of the Colorado General Assembly was that Rome didn’t fall.
The legislature is expected to adjourn Monday. This was the 34th year I’ve watched its antics and I’ve seen Rome topple many times on that long watch.
Early on in my career, anti-pornography bills were staples of Gold Dome theater. Politicians lacking any real facts but eager to score political points would loudly blame the fall of Rome on pornography and licentiousness and warn that Colorado would share Rome’s fate if we didn’t crack down on dirty books and “feelthy” pictures.
Actually, historians believe that Rome fell to the barbarians primarily because it lost the art of infantry. The intricate tactics that made Roman legions so deadly took years of training by dedicated citizen soldiers to master.
As the empire prospered, wealthy citizens preferred to hire barbarian mercenaries, mostly cavalry, and Rome gradually lost the civic fiber that had been its true source of strength. As to pornography, the vivid couplings unearthed at Pompeii testify that the height of the empire’s power was also a time of unbridled sexual excess.
Still, politicians are as unconstrained by historical awareness as they are unembarrassed by hypocrisy, and I lost count of the times I heard the fall of Rome blamed on pornography. Today, major hotels offer porn in their rooms and HBO carries scenes that would make Caligula gag. As pornography went mainstream, many politicians switched to blaming homosexuality for the fall of Rome.
My wife, novelist and supermom Yvonne Montgomery, and I will celebrate our 38th wedding anniversary next month – which we define as “38 glorious years and a few rotten months.” But we’ve never blamed the rough spots in our relationship on the fact that many of the couples in our Capitol Hill neighborhood are gay.
I was honored, therefore, to write the first Denver Post editorial endorsing a domestic partnership law published March 21, 1996. The idea was considered rather radical at the time, but this year’s legislature has indeed passed the Colorado Domestic Partnership Benefits and Responsibilities Act as a referred law that will go before state voters on the Nov. 7 ballot. It won’t change Colorado’s ban on same- sex marriages. But it will give same-sex couples the right to make medical decisions for incapacitated partners, provide access to health-care and family-leave benefits, and protect inheritance rights.
More important, the bill breaks new legal ground by clarifying both the rights and responsibilities of both partners when a gay couple breaks up – especially in regard to any children in their care.
Ensuring the rights of children in the care of gay families is so crucial that even religious conservatives seeking to write a ban on gay marriage into the state constitution specifically wrote their initiative to co-exist with a domestic partnership law. Colorado voters can have it both ways Nov. 7, reserving the honored status of marriage to heterosexuals while reducing the humiliation and discrimination now suffered by homosexuals.
I attended the House and Senate committee hearings on the bill and was amazed that Rome didn’t fall once during that testimony. Indeed, not a single witness spoke against the bill in either hearing. There was lively debate on both the House and Senate floor but not even diehard homophobes like Rep. Kenneth Lundberg, R-Berthoud, invoked the fall of Rome.
Whatever the voters decide in the fall, Colorado is clearly making progress on this long, contentious debate. To me, the proper compromise was proferred almost 2000 years ago in Matthew, Chapter 22,
Verse 21:
Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.
Clearly, the institution of marriage contains both sacred and secular aspects. Marriage is recognized by all major religions as a sacrament and only those religions are entitled to say who is qualified in their eyes for the special grace of God conveyed in marriage. But forming a family, gay or straight – and especially a family with children – also establishes secular rights and responsibilities that the state has a compelling interest in protecting and enforcing.
If voters approve the Colorado Domestic Partnership Benefits and Responsibilities Act this fall, it won’t trigger the fall of Rome. But it might finally endow a few unorthodox families with the dignity they have long deserved.
Bob Ewegen (bewegen@denverpost.com) is The Denver Post’s deputy editorial page editor.
