Gay rights in Cuba

DeWayne Wickham, whose opinion columns on Cuba for Gannett News Service suggest he is trying to channel Herbert Matthews, is impressed that Cuba is moving towards ending discrimination of homosexuals and granting gay couples certain rights. If only the United States were so progressive, Wickham writes from Havana:

"We have to abolish any form of discrimination against those persons," said Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba's National Assembly. "We are trying to see how to do that, whether it should be to grant them the right to marry or to have same-sex unions."

Alarcon said he expects Cuba's communist government will soon enact a law to do one or the other. "We have to redefine the concept of marriage," he said. "Socialism should be a society that does not exclude anybody."

This awakening comes less than a year after President Bush renewed his call for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. "Our policies should aim to strengthen families, not undermine them, and changing the definition of marriage would undermine the family structure," Bush said in June.

Just one state, Massachusetts, allows gay marriages. And only four permit some form of same-sex union, which falls short of the definition of marriage but lets gay couples have some legal rights.

How ironic is this? While a country that successive U.S. governments have called a totalitarian state is moving toward expanding the rights of gays and lesbians, the president of the United States — the world's leading democracy — wants to restrict their rights.

Bush is wrong about amending the Constitution — that's no place for legalized discrimination. But Wickham's moral equivalency argument is ridiculous, for how it ignores the discrimination and outright persecution of all Cubans — no matter with whom they go to bed at night.

Even if Wickham is right about gay rights in Cuba, there's no comfort in knowing that homosexuals on the island may no longer be suffering any more than straight Cubans have for almost 50 years.