Friday, November 14, 2008
2008 Protest Letter from Woodland, CA
Posted by Eli Sanders on Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 7:08 PM
Last year, my husband and I moved to California from Massachusetts.When same sex marriage became legal, we joked that we ought to move to Texas next, since gay marriage seemed to follow us everywhere. When prop 8 was put on the ballot, we thought it was just a chance to participate in history: we'd get to vote against the first statewide gay marriage ban that didn't pass. When the polls turned the other way, I donated, and I'm a grad student who'd never donated to anything in my life. I woke up November 5 more angry about a vote than I have ever been. I couldn't believe it.
My husband has spent his spare time since the election writing letters to the newspaper in our rural town and replying to the trolls who comment on the online version with all the reason he can muster. I asked a conservative friend who voted in Florida how she voted on their Prop 2, and wound up shaking with anger. I thought gave up arguing my beliefs with people who I know aren't open to changing their minds a long time ago, but I can't keep myself uninvolved in this issue. I have to do something. Neither my husband nor I have ever been to a protest, but I decided about two seconds after stumbling across www.jointheimpact.com yesterday that it's time to change that.
Our family is going to Sacramento tomorrow morning. I'll be damned if I'm going to let my son grow up in a country where equality is only allowed if it's popular.
-Another married woman for equality
Send me a letter about your feelings today, or your experience marching against Prop 8 tomorrow, here.
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sea_rooster@msn.com Jeremiah
whenever equality is considered "liberal", society is messed up
And I read this in the article:
The Klan was driven underground, but re-formed after World War I. Klan activity increased during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and has surged again since 2006 as a result of opposition to gay marriage and immigration.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/11/14/klan…
So sad.
I'm not trolling but I did fuck up Dans quote, it was, "You lost, it’s over, shut the fuck up."
My sincerest apologies.
That is in stark contrast to the day the California Supreme Court released the In re Marriage Cases decision. I told my mom that day that the decision made me proud to be a Californian. As a law student, I geeked out on the opinion--the California Supreme Court applied the most stringent level of judicial review to the statute because it classified citizens on the basis of their sexual orientation. That is something that the U.S. Supreme Court has not done and this particular manifestation of the Court is unlikely to do.
Awash in the wake of West Hollywood protests and the flood of commentators' comparisons to interracial marriage, I re-read Loving v. Virginia today. The law at issue there criminalized marriages between whites and nonwhites, excluding descendants of Pocahontas (no joke). The offense was punishable by one to five years in prison. Prison. For not less than a year. But, if you weren't white, you were free to marry any nonwhite with whom you chose to dirty your bloodline. It was, in essence, an embodiment of white supremacist principles.
At the time the USSC decided the case, Virginia's law was one of sixteen similar state laws (Maryland repealed its anti-miscegenation law during the Loving litigation). The laws were relics of slavery and post-WWI hyper-nativism. The lower court judge is on record saying that God put the different races on different continents to keep them separate.
But, in 1967, society was trending toward racial equality, just as I believe we are trending toward sexual orientation equality. During the fifteen years preceding Loving, fourteen states repealed their anti-miscegenation laws. The first to do so? California.
"He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
I'm ashamed to admit that I was naive enough to believe that prop 8 wasn't going to pass in California. It is because of this that I did not have open conversations with people about this issue. I should have started the dialogue before the issue was voted on. I've started to lose faith in us as human beings in our capacity to understand and respect our differences (especially in seeing all the hateful, ignorant, and illogical comments). Your letter is just one of many ray of hopes for me, reigniting my courage to fight for the rights of others (no matter how hopeless it seems). I'm a heterosexual indvidual who has no direct relationships with anyone who is of homosexual orientation and am very glad to see that there IS people of good faith and good heart who knows that love and equality is not an issue of religion, but of our ineliable rights as American citizens and the protections afforded by the constitution. In my heart of hearts, I truly believe that this is a cause to fight for and I wish you and your family the best in your journey for fighting for the equality of all.
That sums all of this up so well. Majority opinion is not a just determinant of minority rights.
I'm not trolling but I did fuck up the troll's quote, it was, "You lost, it’s over, shut the fuck up."
My sincerest apologies.
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