Annals of Derp: Down to Slavery

Paul Moreno's very remarkable argument in The Federalist, in which he claims that

[t]he gay-rights movement has followed not the trajectory of the anti-slavery movement, but of those who supported slavery

starts off not with gay rights or support for slavery, but with polygyny among the early Latter-Day Saints and its opponents:

The first national Republican Party platform, of 1856, denounced polygamy, or “plural marriage,” as a “relic of barbarism.” But this plank was uncontroversial. Even the Democrats condemned polygamy. Somehow Stephen Douglas had no difficulty arguing that people in the territories should be able to choose slavery, but not polygamy. And the targeted Mormons were few in number, isolated in the distant Utah Territory, and without media or business advocates. But the new party drew fire for its religious condemnation of the other relic of barbarism, chattel slavery.

As a matter of fact, as we learn from James Washington Sheahan's 1860 campaign biography of Douglas, the Democrats were very dubious about whether the federal government had the power to ban polygamy in Utah. They didn't approve of it, but would banning it be constitutional?

Douglas's official position, of course, was not that slavery was a good thing, which he never said, but that it wasn't up to the federal government to decide, with that and with marriage law as well, in the same stance that Republicans have held since Ronald Reagan declared himself a "states' rights" advocate in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in August 1980. And indeed, the federal government, whether Republicans or Democrats were in charge, couldn't make up its mind to ban Mormon polygamy decisively (there was an ineffective ban in 1862) until long after Abolition, in 1887. So it wasn't that easy after all.

While we're up, what kind of barbarism did "those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery" refer to? As Mrs. Stenhouse put it, in her famous An Englishwoman in Utah (1879), the barbarism of the Old Testament patriarchs, as reinstated by

the Mormon Church, in which it was so clearly evident that the teachings of Christianity had been supplanted by an attempt to imitate the barbarism of Oriental nations in a long past age, and the sweet influences of the religion of Jesus were superseded by the most objectionable practices of the ancient Jews.

And the association between Mormon plural marriage and slavery was highlighted by Mrs. Stowe (the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin), in her preface to Stenhouse's book, where she explicitly called the one a form of the other:

The slave-pens of the South have become a nightmare of the past ; the auction-block and whipping-post have given place to the church and school-house ; and the songs of emancipated millions are heard through our land. May we not then hope that the hour is come to loose the bonds of a cruel slavery whose chains have cut into the very hearts of thousands of our sisters—a slavery which debases and degrades womanhood, motherhood, and the family ? Let every happy wife and mother who reads these lines give her their sympathy, prayers, and aid to free her sisters from this degrading bondage.

Not that the Mormons held chattel slaves, but they did not object to the practice, sanctioned in the Bible, as Joseph Smith wrote in 1836,

I must not pass over a notice of the history of Abraham of whom so much is spoken in the scriptures. If we can credit the account, God conversed with him from time to time, and directed him in the way he should walk saying, "I am the Almighty God: walk before me and be thou perfect." Paul says that the gospel was preached to this man. And it is further said, that he had sheep and oxen, men servants and maid-servants, &c. From this I conclude, that if the principle had been an evil one, in the midst of the communications made to this holy man, he would have been instructed differently. And if he was instructed against holding men-servants and maid-servants, he never ceased to do it; consequently must have incurred the displeasures of the Lord and thereby lost his blessings--which was not the fact.

And Brigham Young in the famous speech urging the Utah legislature to ban sexual relations between the races, February 5 1852, objected only to the unkindness with which plantation owners of the 1850s treated their slaves, which turned the "blessing" of slavery into a curse (text, with an on-the-spot transcriber's original spelling, from Utah Lighthouse Ministry):

I am as much oposed to the principle of slavery as any man in the present acceptation or usage of the term, it is abused. I am opposed to abuseing that which God has decreed, to take, a blessing, and make a curse of it. It is a great blessing to the seed of Adam to have the seed of Cain for servants, but those they serve should use them with all the heart and feeling, as they would use their own children, and their compassion should reach over them, and round about them, and treat them as kindly, and with that humane feeling necessary to be shown to mortall beings of the human species.

He regarded abolitionism, however, as a threat, which could lead to black people (of whom he hoped lots would come to Utah, to be treated kindly but without civil rights) having sex with whites and, worse, voting:

The indians are Citizens, the Africans are Citizens, and the jews than come from Asia, that are almost entirely of the blood of Cain, It is our duty to take care of them, and administer to them in all the acts of humanity, and kindness, they shall have the right of Citizenship, but shall not have the right to dictate in Church and State matters. The abolishonists of the east, have cirest [caressed?] them them, and. their whol argument are callculated to darken Counsel, as it was here yesterday. As for our bills passing here, we may lay the foundation for what? for men to come here from Africa or else where; by hundreds of thousands. When these men come here from the Islands, are they going to hold offices in Government No. 

Just saying. Though Young really mucked up his Bible references too, in laying the curse of perpetual servitude on the descendants of Adam's son Cain instead of Noah's son Ham.

Anyway, I would say that's a noteworthy difference between the supporters of slavery (and polygamy) and the supporters of marriage equality, that the former took their authority from the Pentateuch and the latter do not. I'm sure whatever you may think the Old Testament says about sodomy, it says nothing about gay marriage at all.

Another major difference has to do with the way the proslavery position started out as normal and gradually became more and more unpopular over the period starting in the late 18th century, to the point where it has virtually disappeared, although I guess if you look hard enough you can always find some weird holdout who has good things to say about the enslavement of Africans, like Pat Buchanan, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, David Horowitz, Trent Franks, or Ann Coulter.

But the marriage equality movement began in the 1970s as a bizarre concept that seemed ridiculous even to most gay people, and then became more popular over time, to the point where it in now favored by majorities of the population in many countries, including the United States. So in that aspect of the historical trajectory, it would be more accurate to say the proslavery movement and the marriage equality movement are the opposite.

So how does Dr. Moreno (the William and Berniece Grewcock professor of constitutional history at Hillsdale College, Michigan, which has been described by National Review as "the conservative Harvard")  square that in his argument? How does he show that two apparently opposed trajectories are actually the same?

Reader, he doesn't. As Joe in comments at LGM complains, he never gets to the argument at all. He plumb forgets to go there! He just spends eight lengthy paragraphs discussing the history of opposition to slavery and its (Democratic) challengers and then asserting his point:

The pro-homosexual movement has followed a similar trajectory, from toleration to equality to supremacy.

That is, if you try to trace it back, proslavery people originally recognized that slavery was wrong (Jefferson, cited as antislavery in paragraph 3, proslavery in paragraph 8) and asked only to be tolerated, and then started insisting that it was right, or possibly even better than the absence of slavery. And probably gay marriage advocates did the same thing but he hasn't researched it yet? Like they used to say "we know it's bad to get gay married but our economy depends on it" and now they say "fuck you breeders we're better than you, let's have a war"? No, wait.

I think what Dr. Moreno may have had in mind with his original hallucination, but was unable to fix on the paper, was an argument of what I have called the retroactionary type, under the quantum assumption of reversible time. From this perspective, the story makes perfect sense.

Proslavery advocacy in this view should be understood working backwards from the present, with its few apparently isolated but prophetic eccentrics like Buchanan and Coulter preaching slavery as a positive good. Then, as we push our focus back to the civil rights era, it becomes more widespread, and turns from Republicans to the southern Democrats. Meanwhile, the African Americans themselves move from their homes and jobs in the industrial cities around the Great Lakes in a vast, decades-long migration to the rural South, where they take up lives as sharecroppers (just as gay people, forward in time, concentrated themselves in stylish coastal enclaves), and the local white people figure well, they're on the plantation already.

Reconstruction and the disastrous experiment in black democracy leads inevitably to the Civil War, and beyond that the long work of de-compromise, where the antislavery movement argues itself into oblivion, and slavery itself triumphs at last, when the colonies return to Britain and the warm utopia of Empire—nobody even thinks there's anything strange about slavery any more! Isn't that exactly what's happening forward in time with gay marriage, even as we speak?