People are bigots. Yes, most believe that their opinion is the right one and often refuse to bend on many issues. Maine's repeal of the their same sex marriage law is proof of that. But it's not the bigots in Maine, in California or any other state where they have voted, may vote, or will vote to legalize or repeal same sex marriage laws that gays are denied equal rights fault. It's the cowardly Congress, Senate, President and Supreme Court. The very people that know that civil rights should never be left up to the electorate. Ever.
People don't often do the right thing in the privacy of the anonymous ballot box. Hidden fears, hidden bigotries, deep-seeded ones many didn't even know they had, come out. That's why equality for blacks would never be up for a vote. Imagine, if we began voting on interracial marriage again. Given the recent justice of the peace who refused to marry an interracial couple, I'm not sure that interracial couples would be able to marry when all the ballots were counted.
The fact is, no civil right should be left up to the masses. Our founders were very clear about equality in the Constitution, and as the t-shirts on my website says, "Equal equals Equal." No, it's not the homophobes or those religious zealots frightened by their church's fault. It's the churches themselves and the cowardly government that either tells all religious institutions to get out of politics or be taxed. And until religion's death grip on our society is loosened, the Constitution must continue to be interpreted by the hopefully educated legislators and Executives (Presidents), the hopefully learned Supreme Court justices whose charge it is to enforce and maintain the equality promised for all Americans, including those who are of the same gender and wish to marry.
Until President Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and nine supremes do their jobs, do what they know must be done, and once and for all grant federal same sex marriage to all, until a law is made that no state can deny anyone the right to enter in to a legal contract based solely on gender, then this battle will continue to be won and lost state by bigoted states. In other words, until someone decides to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
The founders did not want all the power with the people, which is why we are a Republic and not a true Democracy. Maine is a prime example as to why. Shame on the President, the leading Democrats and all the other "liberals" out there who didn't wake up and denounce Maine's vote and pledging to go all the way to the Supreme Court, pledging to get an item on the Congressional agenda, pledging to equal the playing field.
Today, gays and lesbians across America are reminded that it is still all right for the masses to either approve or disapprove of their unions, their lives. That's insulting, to them, and to America. And as for you bystanders, you know, the same type person that would watch a girl get gang raped in Richmond, CA, the same type person that would watch millions of taxpaying Americans be humiliated and denied basic rights granted to all others based on religious dogma and sit by and do nothing (which quietly condones it), well, as for you bystanders "shame on you" would be redundant. The evidence of our shame is all around in a society that can't seem to get basic human rights down 200+ years after a simple document explaining them was given to the nation.
Maine didn't lose a thing. Gays didn't lose a thing. Americans did. Again. All Americans lost the chance to get it right, yet again.
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Civil rights should NEVER be subject to popular vote!
"The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens." --Thomas Jefferson: Note in Destutt de Tracy, "Political Economy,"
"[The] best principles [of our republic] secure to all its citizens a perfect equality of rights." --Thomas Jefferson: Reply to the Citizens of Wilmington, 1809.
"What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789.
"No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him." --Thomas Jefferson to Francis Gilmer, 1816.
"The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government." --Thomas Jefferson to A. Coray, 1823.
Labels: equal rights, Thomas Jefferson
Exactly.
The REAL tea parties would come from the truly disenfranchised sections of our nation: women, CHILDREN, ethnic minorities and gays--REFUSING to pay taxes until we are TRULY represented by this government.
In the spirit of the original tea parties....NO TAXATION without REPRESENTATION. That seems to be what the current crop of "teabag.gers" does not understand. THEY are the incumbent powers, the rest of us are dragged along for a nightmare of a ride.
Right now, to me as a woman in this country who has extensively traveled in Europe, only white men--and one black man---seem to have any franchise on the power of citizenship at all.
So let THEM pay all the taxes.
And we need GENDER-LESS LAW, where, for example - the response and punishment for violently raping a straight man is EQUAL TO the response and punishment for raping women, gay men, and FTM or MTF transgender persons. The gay press is well-aware of how rapes of gay men and MTF transgender persons are often dismissed by police, since "we wanted it anyway". Or an intersex person may marry a straight man, or a FTM transgender person may marry a bisexual man. I know of couples like these. EQUAL SOULS.
And women already know how invasive the male hands of government are.....or the pay inequity of the business world.
No Taxation Without Equality (FOR MAINE)
http://gaytaxprotest.blogspot.com/2008/08/civil-disobedience.html
"Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes."
- Alexander Haig, U.S. Sec. of State, June 12, 1982