You Made Me Love You:
I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it.
Sheila Mengert
Writer and Lecturer
The whole process of embodying what is essentially political reform in and by legal means has been controversial since its apotheosis in the Supreme Court of the Warren years. That we continue to believe that we can legislate civility by embodying social norms in legal language is a tribute to the value of law as a force of education but may create the very resistance that we see in the endless initiative battles between GLBT rights organizations and organizations who clothe their fear and animosity beneath the banner of family values.
If law is not to be a question of ownership by various alternating partisan groups and is to command a shared loyalty based on principles that even those who may differ as to application will still applaud as the very basis of our society based on a respect for all persons, we must find a shared ground that mandates the very protections that we seek.
Failing to establish what this common ground is we can only adopt a strategy of appearing to belong to the dominant population or adopt a strategy that by deliberately flouting the symbol systems of the dominant population, calls its most sacred values into question. Both of these strategies imply a despair that law can mediate diverse interests. If that be in fact the case, then we are already beyond the law, and occupying instead that area of sullen discontent where those whom the institutions of society, of which law is only one, wait for their hour to come. This is the realm of revolution and not of law. Does that mean there need be no revolution? That is what will make this conference interesting as we explore the parameters of hope.