“If you don’t want gay marriage…don’t have one.”
It seems like yesterday that my friends and I rampaged the rough suburbia residential streets of the Silicon Valley yanking out the “YES ON PROP 22″ signs from people’s lawns and then making quick getaways. It wasn’t much, (and I’m pretty sure it was illegal) but it was the one of the only things that we as 17 year-old (read: unable to vote) high school seniors and the founding class of the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) felt we could do. — Looking back, I’m sure we could have done more productive things — but I have to say, it sure helped us let out some steam.
Anyhow, as you guys have probably heard, the amendments made by Prop 22 in the 2000 elections to the California constitution have been overturned… Meaning the ban on same-sex marriage is, for now, gone.
I was on the road yesterday when I found out I (embarrassingly) actually cried tears of joy. Perhaps because I’m on my way to getting married myself, it makes the victory even more poignant to me.
I’m so happy that all the people I have met and known along the way can get married and be able to feel the way I do. It’s amazing being engaged to the man I love, and I know it’s going to be even more wonderful spending the rest of our lives together as a family.
I know would feel like I was losing something if my marriage vows were called a “domestic partnership”… Even if I knew everything was exactly the same. The connotations hold different weights. (For example, making love, having sex and f***ing could all be talking about the same thing, the same event, but you can’t tell me that they evoke the same feeling).
Separate is not equal… and I don’t think separate can be equal. Not for colored people who wanted to use a restroom or ride at the front of a bus…It wasn’t for women who wanted to vote… and it isn’t for gay people who want to get married.
Interracial Marriage
In 1959 a trial judge sentenced an interracial couple to a year in prison for leaving the state to get married, and then returning to the state as a married couple. He stated:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red,
and He placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference
with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The
fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the
races to mix.”
How different and unforgiving would our world would be if that ruling hadn’t been overturned by the US Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
Concluding I know that it’s going to be a hard road to keep the California Supreme Court’s ruling in place. There are a lot of dissenters, and a new amendment to counteract this overruling will almost certainly be on the ballot in November. I’m not as worried this year, though, and I probably won’t be pulling signs off people’s front lawn any time soon…
The difference this time around? I can vote…which (I think, anyway) makes a much larger difference.
Holy crap, I wrote an essay.
la pride parade 2005
