Dire legacy of Jamestown

lewleadbeater.com

notes from the edge

Home

Email Me

				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Dire legacy of Jamestown				July 12, 2003

Richard Cornish, a sea captain whose ship, the Ambrose, lay at anchor in the James River, was hanged in Jamestown in 1624. His crime? He allegedly had sex with another man. Furthermore, those, like Edward Nevell, who opposed his execution, were whipped and had their ears cut off.

It seems that the Jamestown settlers were more Talibanesque than we would like to think.

In 1776, fully 152 years later, came the issuance of the Declaration of Independence, which theorized that “all men are created equal” and possessed of the unalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Not happiness, but the pursuit of happiness.

Why the framers of the Declaration chose not to list happiness itself as an unalienable right is no doubt reflective of the fact that the word is so subjective as to be indefinable. Hence, happiness is something for which each of us strives as part of an ongoing process.

Yet, like Aristotle, they realized that happiness as a goal is directly related to activity in a polity. It can be achieved only when a state is so constructed that it provides for all its citizens the milieu in which to develop their characters and intellects for the sake of noble ends and the common good. Conversely, those whom the state shuns or who, like hermits, choose to live apart from the polity, can never properly pursue happiness.

Ironically, the framers were perhaps more prescient than they knew when they insisted on making happiness the object of constant pursuit.

Despite our sanguine view of the intrepid settlers who colonized Jamestown, the fact is that they introduced both slavery and homophobia to their new land. Hence, from that day until this, gays and African-Americans have been involved in the constant pursuit not only of happiness, but of life and liberty as well. Indeed, no less a declarer than Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and suggested that homosexuals be castrated.

Jefferson notwithstanding, the pursuit continued, and just recently the Supreme Court, in two immensely important cases, provided both blacks and gays an easier ride on the road to happiness and political inclusion.

Academic diversity was found to be inherently good and sodomy laws inherently discriminatory. In his summation of the Lawrence case, Justice Anthony Kennedy maintained that the obligation of the law is “to define the liberty of all, not to mandate its own moral code.”

Unfortunately, there are those, like Justice Antonin Scalia, who would take us back to the days of Jefferson and opt for the rule of subtle exclusion in academia.

As for gays, rather than grant them the right to their own pursuit of happiness, Scalia pejoratively belittled their trials by cloaking them in the guise of some discrimination-breeding phobia inherent in the so-called homosexual agenda.

Following the lead of Scalia, Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore not unexpectedly responded negatively to the court’s sodomy decision. “I disagree with the ruling,” he said, “and am always disappointed when a court undermines Virginia’s right to pass legislation that reflects the views and values of our citizens.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was the same argument used in Virginia against the Supreme Court’s demand for integrated schools and again when the court obliterated another piously regressive Virginia law prohibiting interracial marriages.

Still, Kilgore’s reaction is not singular. Just recently, a reader suggested in the Last Word that the death of the sodomy laws in Virginia “drove a stake into the very heart of marriage.” Removing the stigma on gays would lead to “heart-wrenching divorce, single women with children living in poverty and increasingly violent unparented children.”

Just how granting gays the right to privacy in their own bedrooms is going to lead to heterosexual divorce and violent unparented children is indeed enigmatic, unless what appears to be a blatant non sequitur actually implies that heterosexual men are going to be bailing out on their families in droves in order to jump into bed with gay men.

Similarly silly is the notion that giving gays the right to privacy or marriage is going to, of a sudden, produce a massive outcry to legalize bestiality, prostitution and sex in public. Nothing could be more myopically moronic or illogical.

Yet, even as the Supreme Court is trying extricate us from the legal morass in which hate and discrimination have long festered, Rep. Jo Ann Davis (R-1^st), that engineer of exclusivity, has become one of the leading proponents of the so-called Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution.

Deathly afraid that gays, like heterosexuals, might acquire some legal standing through marriage, Davis is desperate to append the strictures of Leviticus to the Constitution and prove once again that, despite the pronouncements of Justice Kennedy, the law does not grant all men the liberty to pursue happiness or membership in our polity.

Such is the legacy of Jamestown.

As we gird ourselves for an elaborate celebration in 2007, we should perhaps pause and reflect upon the abhorrent and discriminatory values we have inherited from that colony.

Not inappropriately might we also recall the grisly death of Richard Cornish and perhaps turn a positive page by supporting the endowment for gay and lesbian studies that bears his name at the College of William & Mary.