Proposition 8: What Would Hitler Really Say?

Over the past few decades, very few political parties have equated the opposing side to Nazi Germany. Right here in California such an argument was made in late October over Proposition 8. Since it was passed in November, Prop 8 eliminated the rights for same-sex couples to wed in California. Back in October, a spokesman for the ‘Yes on Prop 8’ campaign preached to a crowd of supporters drawing a parallel between the opponents of Prop 8 and Nazi Germany. In other words, Brad Dacus warned that if Prop 8 were to be struck down, it would be like letting the Nazis win. Brad Dacus is the President of the conservative Pacific Justice Institute, an organization of lawyers who specialize in defending religious freedoms. In a video posted on YouTube and many other prominent websites, Brad Dacus fervently spoke to a group waving yellow “yes on Prop 8” signs. Dacus reasoned that because the Church allowed Hitler to take care of “the soul of Germany” bombs fell on Germany and its churches. He closed with the phrase: “Let us not make that mistake folks.”

In this case, Dacus made the mistake. He mistook the bell of change in favor of equal rights for the threat of terror released by the Nazis. Dacus should have thoroughly explored the history behind his metaphor before preaching it to a group of supporters and a hungry cameraman because his comparison was completely off base. Since Dacus released this can of worms, I felt I had the duty to reassess his comparison. First of all, Dacus and Hitler were both rightwing extremists, who hated homosexuals. I see a much greater similarity between those two men than between the Nazis and supporters of gay rights. Hitler strove to create an Aryan racial state, by eradicating all people who were not Germanic. Does this sound at all like denying marriage that is not between one man and one woman? A form of xenophobia cultivated by religion and propaganda convinced people, even in the twenty first century, that the sanctity of their marriage and their children’s marriage was under attack. In extension, Dacus actually implied that gays should be rounded up and sent off to concentration camps, and maybe even the gas chambers because their differences made them incompatible with the “right” way of life. And, as everyone knows, “might makes right.”

Gay marriage is a particularly difficult issue to bring into political debate. It is almost impossible for people to separate their church from their politics because it is their religion that helped to formulate their views on this topic. I understand that some people voted to enact prop 8 because they feared the “homosexual lifestyle” would be exposed to children, but Dacus made no such argument.

According to Dacus, defeating homosexuals is like defeating Hitler. I believe Dacus used such an analogy because he thought that no one would dare contradict such an argument. But the truth is that Christians were not the ones persecuted during the Holocaust, so Dacus has no right to put forth such a horrendous analogy. Gay people wanted the same rights as every other racial or religious minority. There was no room for such differences in Nazi Germany; I hope that one day everyone in our country will choose to include those who are different.

The foundation of America was built on the idea that religious and racial freedoms would one day be equally acknowledged. At one time it was women’s rights, and then interracial marriage. Our constitution was written to protect minority groups, and that is why the California Supreme Court voted to extend marriage to gays in May of last year. However, the statewide vote on Proposition 8 stood against the foundation of our constitution. This proposition asked the majority to determine the rights of a particular minority group, one that many religions have a particularly hard time accepting. I believe it was wrong to place this question before the public because minority rights are designed to protect the minority from the majority. Because gay people are a minority group, having their rights defined by public majority vote is therefore, by definition, unconstitutional.