|
Supreme Court |
 |
Nearly half a century after
the Supreme Court lifted bans on interracial marriage
nationwide, it has now just lifted bans on same sex marriage
across America. Lets be clear, 50 years ago the
President's parents would not have been able to marry in
nearly half the states in our nation. The President's
parents married in Hawaii in 1961, a state that had never
enacted an anti-miscegenation law. His mom's home
state, Kansas, lifted its ban on interracial marriage in
1948. The last state to do that was Alabama which did
so in 2000, imagine!
In late April, the Supreme Court heard oral
arguments about allowing Same Sex Marriage to become the law
of the land or not.
According to the recounting of our day in court,
they talked about the traditions of aboriginals in
the Kalahari desert, and millennia old mores; all this at the dawn of the third millennium.
Fifty or a hundred years from now, folks will shake their heads in
disbelief that there was such a serious discourse on something so self
evident as equal rights. In the future they'll be arguing about
the rights of robots to marry, no doubt. And what about the rights
of gay and transgender robots! Will they be giving impeccably clever logical software responses to questions about their hardware?
Whilst our highest most infallible civil
court engaged in dead serious deliberation grappling with
the gravity of superstition and exclusion, meanwhile in May,
the Prime Minister of Luxembourg married his same sex
partner in a rite attended by European heads to state,
royalty, and surely the gay Prime Minister of Belgium and
the former lesbian Prime Minster of Iceland and her wife.
Iceland! And in Ireland, a conservative Catholic
country, two thirds of that nation's voters voted to
enshrine same sex marriage into their sacred constitution!
The 'Yes' vote was supported by all of the country's
political parties. Ireland!
So what now? Incensed
opponents, who seem not to have lives of their own to live,
are fulminating with livid fury, red faced, billowing steam
from their ears, and shaking spittle from their jowls as
they howl in indignant unrighteous outrage. Far right
red faced red state representatives have been plotting for
months in anticipation of equality, conjuring convoluted
legislation to delegitimize our newly gained
enfranchisement.
So, sadly, after we
celebrate and march with joyous abandon in pride parades,
its back to the barricades, because the battle isn't over.
To paraphrase Churchill, this is not the beginning of the
end, it is only the end of the beginning of our battle for
freedom. As was the clarion cry of protest in San
Francisco in the seventies, its back to "out of the bars and
into the streets" demanding our rights again and again;
because we're not going to wait another fifty years for full
equality.
If we are good enough to fight and die for our nation, we're good enough to live and love in freedom!
-Sgt First Class Denny Meyer
Gay Vietnam Era Veteran
single and available
©2015 GayMilitarySignal