In last month’s 200th anniversary celebration of the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill , Governor-elect Deval Patrick read an 1860 speech by slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The speech was given at Boston‘s Music Hall after a mob drove Douglass out of the Tremont Temple.

 

Douglass said of the mob, “The law of free speech and the law for the protection of public meetings they trampled under foot, while they greatly magnified the law of slavery. The scene was an instructive one. Men seldom see such a blending of the gentlemen with the rowdy as was shown on that occasion. It proved that human nature is very much the same, whether in tarpaulin or broadcloth.”

 

Patrick would go on to read from the section of the speech where Douglass said, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money. I have no doubt that Boston will vindicate this right.

 

“But in order to do so, there must be no concessions to the enemy. When a man is allowed to speak because he is rich and powerful, it aggravates the crime of denying the right to the poor and humble.”

 

A month later, Patrick would show that there is more Douglass in him than previously known. The rich and powerful likes of former Governor Mitt Romney used his last weeks in power to masquerade as a gentleman of the constitution, trying to trample gay marriage. “Put it to the people!” was his crocodile cry in his successful bid to keep alive efforts in the Legislature to put a ban on same-sex marriage on the 2008 ballot.

 

The Supreme Judicial Court rightfully judged three years ago that the Massachusetts Constitution “forbids the creation of second-class citizens.” The court said opponents of gay marriage had “failed to identify any relevant characteristic that would justify shutting the door to civil marriage to a person who wishes to marry someone of the same sex.” A ban, the court said, would work a “deep and scarring hardship on a very real segment of the community for no rational reason.”

 

Opponents of gay marriage, like opponents of emancipation a century and a half ago and opponents of integration a half century ago, hid behind what it claims were majority sentiments in the face of a blatant denial of human rights.

 

Patrick sniffed this out in protesting the resuscitating of the ban this week. He said, “I believe that adults should be free to choose whom they wish to love and to marry. . . . above all, this is a question of conscience. Using the initiative process to give a minority fewer freedoms than the majority and to inject the state into fundamentally private affairs is a dangerous precedent.”

 

Patrick will have to prove in the months ahead that he has the political muscle to back up the rhetoric and persuade legislators not to put such a divisive, antiquated initiative on the ballot. But his rhetoric is an optimistic echo of Douglass. Unlike many a black minister, he is not afraid to connect civil rights with gay rights, just as Douglass grew from his initial mission of emancipation of slaves to embrace the disenfranchisement of others.

 

Douglass became arguably his era’s most ardent male advocate of women’s rights.

 

“Recognizing not sex, nor physical strength, but moral intelligence and the ability to discern right from wrong, good from evil, and the power to choose between them as the true basis of Republican government . . . ” Douglass said, “I was not long in reaching the conclusion that there was no foundation in reason or justice for woman’s exclusion from the right of choice in the selection of the persons who should frame the laws and thus shape the destiny of all the people, irrespective of sex.”

 

Even more definitively, in an amazing 19th-century foreshadowing of the SJC’s 21-century decision, Douglass said, “In a word, I have never yet been able to find one consideration, one argument, or suggestion in favor of man’s right to participate in civil government which did not equally apply to the right of woman.”

 

Frederick Douglass would go on to serve in federal government under Reconstruction. This week, Deval Patrick began running a government. From the heavens, Douglass watches to see whether Patrick can stand firm on the notion that there is no foundation in reason or justice for the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the right of marriage.

 

 

Derrick Z. Jackson’s e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

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