First published in the Chicago Free Press, July 19, 2006.
What if.
What if, posed John Tierney in a New York Times op-ed, what if the red states and blue states were divided into different countries? What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War and been allowed to secede?
“Northern liberals wouldn’t be ranting at George W. Bush and Pat Robertson,” Tierney wrote. “They wouldn’t be frantically trying to find a candidate who appealed to the Bible Belt.”
He continued, “Southern conservatives wouldn’t have to fight for moral values against Godless Yankees. ÉPolitics in both countries might be less partisan, even civil.”
Imagine that world. We could leave that counterfactual Confederacy to battle Mexican immigration and impose fascist Christian rule. The North would have more equality and thus a richer culture.
Let’s ignore the small inconvenient fact that red states stretch up to the northern border in the Great Plains and mountain states and imagine that a Civil War the United States lost would be a Civil War that divided us nicely in half, with the blue liberals on top and the red conservatives swimming along beneath.
Our more liberal United States would have stopped fighting over abortion years ago. It would be a non-issue now. We’d teach science in schools without ever having to explain why we weren’t also teaching creationism; we’d have socialized health care like our neighbor to the north; we’d have had a woman president.
Plus all those benefits for gays and lesbians. Gay marriage would now be a given, and we would be serving openly in the military. There would be gay equality everywhere. It would be like living in Canada.
But here’s the thing.
Canada’s not the paradise it seems.
Last week, for example, thousands of Christians descended on Ottawa to pray for the overturning of the country’s gay marriage law. Seems like something that would happen in the South, doesn’t it?
Then I started thinking about trouble areas.
Illinois went easily to John Kerry. We’re blue. Lincoln made his home here, for heaven’s sake—we’d be the proudest of the Northern United States. Yet in Springfield, our capital, the Episcopal bishop recently signaled strong distaste for the church’s new presiding bishop because she’s in favor of blessing same-sex marriages.
And it’s well known that southern Illinois might as well be Tennessee.
And those Southern states? They’re not all as anti-gay as we imagine. A federal court recently ruled that a gay-straight alliance must be allowed to meet in Gainesville, Ga. The Supreme Court in Arkansas affirmed that there must be no ban on gay foster parents. The University of Louisville, in red Kentucky, voted to offer domestic partner benefits. The Tennessee Supreme Court challenged a proposed ban on same-sex marriage.
Let’s take a look at our blue states, shall we?
A Rochester, N.Y., judge ruled that a transgender man couldn’t change his name from Sarah to Evan. Connecticut’s legislature said no to same-sex marriage, because residents already had watered-down civil unions. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill giving California same-sex marriage last year. The Massachusetts legislature took up a gay marriage ban.
And New York ruled that gays and lesbians didn’t deserve marriage because—and this is the strangest thing I’ve ever heard—their unions are too stable.
The lesson?
Life for liberals—and gays and lesbians—wouldn’t in fact be easier if America had no red states, because America isn’t so easily divided between red and blue, conservative and liberal, Christian and secular, homophobic and gay-friendly.
Instead, we are a patchwork of local feeling, with blue municipalities tucked within red counties hidden in states that are more purple than primary-colored.
Gays and lesbians are in a battle for equality. To win any sort of battle, you need first to see the enemy truly. So let’s dismiss the myth that blue states are good and red states are bad—or that red and blue states even exist as solid entities.
If the South had seceded, the North would have the same troubled mix of conservatives and liberals it does today, as would the Confederacy. Red and blue is an easy shorthand, but it’s a false one. We are not a divided country. We are families struggling over issues that are important to us; we are individuals trying to get our communities to see things our way.
There is no magic bullet—not now, not in a counterfactual world where the North lost the Civil War.
There is no what if.
There is only what now?