Sunday, May 27, 2012

Virginian Pilot: Make Gay Marriage Legal

I nearly fainted when I saw the lead editorial in today's Virginian Pilot which called for Virginia and the federal government to make same sex marriage legal.  Moreover, the column takes both Republicans and Democrats - but more so Republicans - in Virginia for the anti-gay discrimination that is the hallmark of this state.  And yes, "Slideshow" Bob Marshall gets slammed by name.  As do "Christians" who for centuries used the Bible as justification for slavery and later segregation.  Not surprisingly, in the comments left on the editorial some of the local Christofascsists and Kool-Aid drinkers are shrieking and claiming that they, not gays, are the ones being persecuted.  Obviously, these folks are not only liars and hypocrites but they also need to extricate their heads out of their asses.  Here are excerpts from the column:

Democrats and Republicans joined in Virginia to pass a law defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Democrats and Republicans together decided to put the civil rights of homosexuals to a popular vote. And Virginians - Democrats and Republicans - voted to marginalize their gay neighbors in 2006.  It was clear, even then, that history would judge such "defense of marriage" measures harshly - and not only because they do nothing to defend marriage. Popular opinion has been moving inexorably toward tolerance for gay unions.

Still, state lawmakers this month rejected a judicial candidate because of his sexual orientation. That gave his chief detractor, the author of Virginia's constitutional amendment on marriage, the opportunity to explain.  Del. Bob Marshall denounced the notion that gay people struggling for marriage rights have any parallel in history: "Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks never took an oath of office that they broke," he said on CNN. "Sodomy is not a civil right. It's not the same as the civil rights movement."

One of the nation's most forceful civil rights organizations pointedly repudiated thinking like Marshall's: "(T)he NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens," read the organization's statement. "We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the 14th Amendment. ..."

Virginians seemed to recoil immediately at the legislature's vote on the judicial candidate and at Marshall's explanation, seeing both for what they are: embarrassments.  The vote and explanation also represent compelling arguments for why anything short of marriage equality will continue to provide cover for such bigotry and argument.

The federal government once deferred to states on mixed-race marriages, for example, and most passed laws barring it. The avowed purpose, to quote the U.S. Supreme Court, was "an endorsement of the doctrine of white supremacy."  The high court cited 14th Amendment freedoms when it settled the issue for the nation in the 1967 case that pitted Mildred and Richard Loving against Virginia: "To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law."

Civil life and laws aren't fixed to religious doctrine, nor should they be in a secular society.  Churches supported and resisted the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century. But the legislation that ended institutional bigotry arose from America's foundation in equality, belated though its application might have been.

To deny marriage to any couple solely on the basis of the way they are born makes a mockery of America's bedrock principles. To refuse marriage to gay people based on tradition or cultural norms elevates both above human rights.  It gives government too much authority over the most intimate relationship in an adult's life without sufficient civil justification. If the NAACP and Obama's endorsements were overdue, so is this one: Gay marriage should be legal across America, and it should be legal now.

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