Gay Marriage, Don’t be on the Wrong Side of History

Gay Marriage, Don’t be on the Wrong Side of History

Today, North Carolina became the 30^th state in the supposedly most exceptional and most free country in the world to ban marriage for same-sex partners.

The fact is that America has been here before; in the early 1960’s 41 states had laws banning marriage between races.  In 1967, 16 states still had these laws on the books.  I’m sure that the people in those former 41 states truly believed they were right and that God was on their side in prohibiting inter-racial marriage.  That in fact they were protecting traditional marriage as it was intended to be, that marriage should only be between two people of the same race as it would be unnatural for marriage to occur between races. 

Today, except for an attempt by a church in KY recently, people generally see the stupidity of the idea that two people of different races shouldn’t be allowed to be married.  Oh, I’m sure some racist bastards out there still believe this, but generally society has come to realize this prohibition was absurd.  Like people often say, hindsight is 20/20. 

My hope for you today is for you to realize that five, or ten, or twenty years from now people will think the same damn thing about the opposition to same-sex marriage and the ridiculous argument that gay marriage somehow threatens the validity of a marriage for heterosexual couples anywhere.  That somehow allowing same-sex couples to marry will lead to people marrying animals or inanimate objects, this is just ridiculous.  I don’t want you to have to lie in the future when your grandkids ask you what side of this issue you were on.  I want you to proudly look at them and say I supported gay marriage because it was the right thing to do, because two people who love each other should always have had that right.

I leave you with the words of Mildred Loving, the wife in the case that helped eradicate the idiocy, the injustice of the ban against interracial marriage.

“My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.”

“Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the ‘wrong kind of person’ for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.”

“I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

Mildred Loving died in May of 2008.

Anti-Bullying rules show the hypocrisy of adults, what about equality?

Ok, before the darts start to fly and people comment without reading this post let me say in the very first line, bullying is bad, mkay.  No one should be subject to physical or mental abuse simply because of who they are.  I was a thin, short boy, with one of the first divorce families in a pretty tough neighborhood.  I took my fair share of abuse and without a doubt as kids will do, shit rolled downhill and there were people I wasn’t very nice to either.

Back when I was growing up, the mid-70′s, being gay, particularly for a young man was not acceptable.  Doubly if you were effeminate, and there were a couple of guys that suffered for that in my neighborhood as children.  It was wrong, we were all guilty of participating and it certainly has had long-term effects on these men.  One, seems to have adjusted well, is openly out and pretty successful.  The other, not so much, although I haven’t heard much in the last ten years, his life certainly wasn’t following the trajectory he had hoped for as a child.  Let this piece serve as a venue for a very public apology, especially to you Robert for the way I treated you as a child.

The world today is a more sensitive place.  Children are being made aware of bullying as are parents and educators.  Cyberbullying has gotten an incredible amount of attention after several teens committed suicide over the last couple of years after being bullied.  This is all good, unfortunately it doesn’t address the real source of bullying, the values put into the children (or lack thereof) by their parents.  Like racism or any other form prejudice, if what a child is hearing at home are things like, I can’t believe you let a fag beat you.   Well then, what do you expect that child is going to do at school when he/she encounters an effeminate or openly gay male student?  At the end of the day, until we change the values parents teach to their children, change will be slow in coming.

On the news the other day I was listening to a news story about all of the rules that are being put in place against bullying, cyberbulling and the use of language.  A lot of this has been especially focused on how LGBT students are treated.  However there is a signficant hypocrisy that exists at the core of all of this.  We tell our children that they are not to make fun of gay students for being gay, that in fact, gay students are no different from heterosexual students.  Then as a society in general we deny them the right to be married just like heterosexual members of society.  So what is it people, is a gay person the same as a heterosexual person, or should it be ok to bully them and treat them differently?  Because right now the answer in America is treat them like any other person until they are an adult, then you can discriminate against them with impunity.

Equality, Racism and Gay Marriage

We live in a very different America than the one I was born into, I guess that would be true for all of us, but the year of my birth, 1964, was a significant year for another reason, it was the year the Civil Rights Act became law.  This law ended segregation, it made great leaps in removing some of the mechanisms people used to keep blacks and illiterate whites from voting particularly in the south.  It didn’t eliminate voter discrimination but it went a long way in giving blacks more access to the democratic process.  It has always seemed unbelievable to me that the concepts of racial integration and equal access to voting have only been the law for the length of my lifetime, less than 50 years. 

Even more disconcerting is that anti-miscegenation laws were only repealed by the Supreme Court in 1967.  It is hard to imagine that laws against inter-racial marriage persisted in this country even three years after the Civil Rights Act, and if it weren’t for a Virginia court case may have stayed on the books much longer.   A really sad statement on the way our country thinks and operates. 

On the upside, America did pass the Civil Rights Act and we did repeal the miscegenation laws and over the 47 years of my life race relations have improved in this country.  We have not eliminated racism, far from it, but we have made progress and yes, including having a president of African-American descent.  President Obama’s election makes the standard American Dream, that anyone can be present, an equivalent lie to children of both white and black families.

Even with the progress we have made on race relations, one segment of our society remains openly discriminated against, homosexuals.  The Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Transgender (LGBT) community faces open discrimination in many ways in our society but what I want to talk about today is the refusal to give people in this community the right to marry the people they love.  People put forward a lot of reasons why this shouldn’t happen; they need to protect “traditional” marriage, that marriage is a religious ceremony and God hates homosexuals, that same sex marriage will lead to polygamy or even the right to marry animals, and finally that this will lead to “gay” education in the schools.  None of these arguments hold water and most have been addressed in a piece called, “10 Bad Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage.”

Now I think most thinking humans would find the arguments against inter-racial marriage ridiculous in this day and age.  We think wow, how unsophisticated they were to prohibit people of different races to marry.  The interesting thing is that many of the arguments used to support why inter-racial marriage shouldn’t be allowed, are the same arguments being used to prohibit gay marriage as outlined in a piece on the arguments for traditional marriage.  So I have a feeling our great grandchildren, will look back at us, in the same way we look back on our great grandparents and wonder what the hell were they thinking?

So let’s not let that happen, let’s clear one of the last major hurdles to true equality in America and grant equal access to marriage and maybe our great grandchildren will say wow, our great grandparents got it right.