On Tuesday, 14 million Americans ““ equivalent to the
combined populations of New York city, Los Angeles and Chicago
““ agreed gay couples are not worthy of marriage. Never before
have so many Americans come together on one day to simultaneously
voice such blatant discrimination against a targeted group of
people.
It has been a chaotic year for those fighting to expand the
legal parameters of marriage to include gays and lesbians.
In February, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled the state
must offer licenses to same-sex couples starting in May. Eight days
later, the city of San Francisco started issuing marriages.
Officials in New York, New Jersey, California, Oregon and New
Mexico also issued licenses.
Since then, there has been a slew of lawsuits, activist judges,
ballot propositions and radical mayors fighting for and against the
legality of gay marriage.
A majority of voters in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan,
Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma,
Oregon and Utah have made their opinions clear ““ but to what
end?
The 11 propositions passed Tuesday, plus a similar ban approved
by Missouri voters in August, are nothing more than collective hate
speech.
They have no legislative impact, because gay marriage was
already banned in all of those states. Instead, they are a bitter
reminder to gay and lesbian couples in that same-sex marriage is
really, really illegal.
California voters expressed a similar, unnecessarily redundant
sentiment in 2000 when they passed Proposition 22 limiting the
definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman ““
even though it was already a law.
Securing rights for those in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender community will be our generation’s civil rights
movement.
It’s unfortunate that this fight has been turned into a
game of semantics. By using loaded language like tradition, values
and the sanctity of marriage, proponents distract voters from the
fact that they are launching an attack against the gay
community.
A political science professor from UC Berkeley, Bruce Cain, told
the Bruin Wednesday that for gay rights advocates to fight on the
same level as their conservative opponents, they must play the same
language game.
“(They) need to get rid of the language of marriage and
focus on the issue of rights,” he said.
Beyond being a waste of ballot space, these measures also prove
why voters shouldn’t be legislating morality through the
ballot box.
For example, would slavery have been abolished, women granted
suffrage, or segregation overruled if a majority consensus was
needed?
If popular opinion dictated American social policy, abortion
would probably be banned, abstinence mandatory, everyone would have
a gun, and every child would say a prayer before class.
Progressive reform would not be possible without minority
opinion.
It isn’t time to conform, though this election may seem
like a huge setback.