Would you support gay marriage as a 1916 presidential candidate?

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@John_Mace

Actually, that was only true for about half the states at the time.

The 19th amendment gave all women the right to vote, but many states had already adopted women’s suffrage before that amendment passed.

That some states allowed women’s suffrage is irrelevant. No woman could vote in a federal election and that’s what a presidential race was.

@Martin_Hyde

America didn’t have a general practice of banning interracial marriage, anti-miscegenation laws typically only applied to black-white relationships, and even when they were more broadly written they were typically only enforced on black-white couples.

There were far fewer Asians at the time, but many states had specific anti-Asian provisions in their laws, and such a marriage would have been discouraged elsewhere.

Anti-miscegenation laws discouraging marriages between Whites and non-Whites were affecting Asian immigrants and their spouses from the late 17th to early 20th century. By 1910, 28 states prohibited certain forms of interracial marriage. Eight states including Arizona, California, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, and Utah extended their prohibitions to include people of Asian descent. The laws of Arizona, California, Mississippi, Texas, and Utah referred to “Mongolians”. Asians in California were barred by anti-miscegenation laws from marrying White Americans (a group including Hispanic Americans). Nevada and Oregon referred to “Chinese,” while Montana listed both “Chinese” and “Japanese” persons.[16] For example, a Eurasian daughter born to an Indian father and Irish mother in Maryland in 1680 was classified as a “mulato” and sold into slavery,[17] and the Bengali revolutionary Tarak Nath Das’s white American wife, Mary K. Das, was stripped of her American citizenship for her marriage to an “alien ineligible for citizenship.”[17] In 1918, there was controversy in Arizona when an Indian farmer married the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of his White tenants.[18] California law did not explicitly bar Filipinos and whites from marrying, a fact brought to wide public attention by the 1933 California Supreme Court case Roldan v. Los Angeles County; however the legislature quickly moved to amend the laws to prohibit such marriages as well in the aftermath of the case.[19][20]

[MaxTheVool]

I feel like the hypothetical clearly has built into it “you actively want to become president and believe you will do a good job”.

In which case, I think clearly the right approach is to say nothing about it during the campaign, don’t actually try to push a bill through congress (once elected) that would never possibly pass and would politically destroy you, and instead use the power of the presidency to subtly push for gay rights and gay acceptance as best you can.

The really interesting question is how recently that stops being an ethically sound choice… and the consensus view among liberals (including myself) is that it was still an ethically sound choice in 2008.

[MaxTheVool]

@Exapno_Mapcase

That some states allowed women’s suffrage is irrelevant. No woman could vote in a federal election and that’s what a presidential race was.

Are you sure of that? Remember, the way US election laws are set up, each state is in charge of selecting a slate of Electoral College electors, who are then the ones that actually “elect” the president. That’s why a few states divide their electors proportionally but most are winner-take-all. It’s certainly at least plausible that individual states could choose to allow women to vote for their slate of electors.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@ctnguy

It doesn’t really make sense to talk about same-sex marriage in a society where the law imposed very different rights and responsibilities on the roles of “husband” and “wife”. I think a prerequisite for marriage equality (in the sense of SSM) was equality in marriage between men and women.

So I wouldn’t have supported SSM in 1916 because it wouldn’t really have made sense, given what marriage meant in that era. This is kind of related to the “definition of marriage” arguments of anti-SSM people. They just don’t seem to realise that the definition of marriage already changed, not because of SSM but because of gender equality.

Yeah, this is what I would’ve thought: that the very concept of same-sex marriage doesn’t really make sense in the context of 1916. Was there anybody who was seriously proposing it at the time?

[Martin_Hyde]

@Exapno_Mapcase

That some states allowed women’s suffrage is irrelevant. No woman could vote in a federal election and that’s what a presidential race was.

I don’t believe that’s accurate based on this article. Generally our constitution leaves voting issues up to the States, especially for the selection of Presidential electors (some of the earliest elections many States selected electors via State legislature, for example.)

There were far fewer Asians at the time, but many states had specific anti-Asian provisions in their laws, and such a marriage would have been discouraged elsewhere.

I wasn’t aware of that for Asians, but am not too surprised. While much smaller in number, and never outright enslaved, some of the rhetoric on Asian immigrants in the 19th century are probably among the most racist things widely supported/published in U.S. history, even worse than some of the rhetoric I’ve seen about blacks from that era.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@MaxTheVool

Are you sure of that? Remember, the way US election laws are set up, each state is in charge of selecting a slate of Electoral College electors, who are then the ones that actually “elect” the president. That’s why a few states divide their electors proportionally but most are winner-take-all. It’s certainly at least plausible that individual states could choose to allow women to vote for their slate of electors.

@Martin_Hyde

I don’t believe that’s accurate based on this article. Generally our constitution leaves voting issues up to the States, especially for the selection of Presidential electors (some of the earliest elections many States selected electors via State legislature, for example.)

I’m not sure and I should have checked more than my memory. Yes, women did vote in earlier presidential elections in suffrage states. Sorry.

[Derleth]

@Thudlow_Boink

Yeah, this is what I would’ve thought: that the very concept of same-sex marriage doesn’t really make sense in the context of 1916. Was there anybody who was seriously proposing it at the time?

I can’t find any reference to people agitating for officially-recognized same-sex marriage prior to the early 1970s, post-Stonewall. Cite and cite although neither of those cites are definitive. Going prior to that you have things like “Boston Marriages” and other arrangements where people of the same sex lived together and said really ambiguous things about it, but nobody was advocating for official status for such unions. Going back before that and you inevitably wind up in times and places where the notions of “gay” and “straight” don’t even necessarily apply, and I’m not even going to attempt to impose our notions of either “gay” or “marriage” on the Classical Greeks so don’t bring them up.

So to answer your question, “Not that I can find, but there were probably a number of reasonably happy lesbians back then just the same.”

[John_Mace]

@Exapno_Mapcase

That some states allowed women’s suffrage is irrelevant. No woman could vote in a federal election and that’s what a presidential race was.

All elections in the US are run by the states. Did you look at the map? It explicitly listed those states that allowed women to vote, but only for president.

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

In 1916, I, as a black American, would have much more pressing concerns than SSM.

[Miller]

1916 is way too early to press for gay marriage. Homosexuality is still illegal in 1916 in much of the country. Marriage rights is what you press for when you’ve already got everything else. In 1916, gays didn’t have anything else.

[John_Mace]

@Miller

1916 is way too early to press for gay marriage. Homosexuality is still illegal in 1916 in much of the country. Marriage rights is what you press for when you’ve already got everything else. In 1916, gays didn’t have anything else.

Sodomy ( and we all what THAT means) was a felony in every state until just a few decades ago. So yeah, pressing for SSM in 1916 would be putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.

[Bryan_Ekers]

There are more attainable progressive platforms than gay marriage in 1916. Heck, knowing what I know now, I’d be pushing a science and technology platform, coupled with opening up educational opportunities for women, and trying to push for moderate use of alcohol instead of the pending disaster of prohibition.

Even those might be risky to a 1916 electorate. I’d probably have a better chance with promising to keep the U.S. out of the Great War. Or get the U.S. into the Great War. I’d have to see what my potential backers prefer.

[John_Mace]

@Bryan_Ekers

There are more attainable progressive platforms than gay marriage in 1916. Heck, knowing what I know now, I’d be pushing a science and technology platform, coupled with opening up educational opportunities for women, and trying to push for moderate use of alcohol instead of the pending disaster of prohibition.

Oddly enough (or not), one of the big concerns about woman’s suffrage was that it might speed up prohibition.

[UltraVires]

A further point is that as a presidential candidate, even if you weren’t dismissed for all of the reasons above, people would point out that marriage laws are a state issue. Hell, that was argued in 1993-2015; it was indisputable in 1916.

[RTFirefly]

@Velocity

This is SDMB overanalysis and dodging the question. The point of this poll is whether people support what they support or oppose what they oppose regardless of the prevailing public sentiment of the time.

As a private person in 1916, I would support the same things I support now, assuming those things existed. (Supporting net neutrality in 1916 would get me some pretty quizzical looks.)

As the standard-bearer for a major political party, I would not have that same freedom, at least from a moral perspective: the people who entrusted me with the nomination would have assumed I wouldn’t deliberately sabotage my own campaign. As a political candidate, you have to decide which are the battles that are the most worth fighting, given the combination of importance in general, and winnability.

If you, as a Presidential candidate in 1916, publicly support gay marriage, you’re sacrificing everything else you might accomplish to raise the visibility of an issue way before the time when it would do any good. To suggest that a decision to not support gay marriage in that context in 1916 represents a lack of integrity is ridiculous.

[Bryan_Ekers]

Heh, reminds me of someone who (I think) tried to suggest that if I couldn’t see myself calling for the abolition of slavery in ancient Greece, I was morally unqualified to comment on abortion.

[John_Mace]

@Bryan_Ekers

Heh, reminds me of someone who (I think) tried to suggest that if I couldn’t see myself calling for the abolition of slavery in ancient Greece, I was morally unqualified to comment on abortion.

OTOH, you might have had more luck supporting SSM in ancient Greece than in 1916 America.

[XT]

Say you were a presidential candidate in the year 1916; around a century ago. Would you support gay marriage (a popular position in 2016, but almost unfathomable in 1916,) or not?

Would I be serious about winning the election? If so then it would be pointless to support gay marriage since the vast majority of people in the US (a.k.a. ‘voters’) wouldn’t support such an issue. Hell, they probably wouldn’t even recognize it AS an issue. You’d probably have more support for a stance on civil rights in 1916 than SSM…which is to say, you’d lose badly, but at least the voters would understand where you were coming from and the issue, even if they would vote overwhelmingly against you.

[John_Mace]

Whenever asked about my stance on SSM, I’d be sure to say I supported it.

[XT]

@John_Mace

Whenever asked about my stance on SSM, I’d be sure to say I supported it.

Yeah, me too. At any press conference or other event if I were asked about it I’d definitely say I support the movement and think it should happen. I’m sure I’d be bombarded with such questions constantly in 1916.