Okay, so far we've had nationwide marriage equality in the US for about one week and and the country hasn't descended into chaos and anarchy yet. Same-sex couples are getting married, and somehow the world has not yet ended.
But it could at any minute! Senator Ted Cruz called the Supreme Court decision that overturned state marriage bans "the darkest twenty-four hours in our nation's history."
Really, our darkest 24 hours? It's a week and a half after a racist mass shooting at a church, but this is a darkest hour? Darker than, I don't know, in chronological order, the passage of the Indian Removal Act, the Battle of Gettysburg, the Dred Scott Decision, the 1918 flu epidemic, the Stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of Martin Luther King or JFK or Robert Kennedy,the Kent State shootings, the Challenger explosion, the Oklahoma City bombings, among others.
Worse than all of those is this? Jack Evans and George Harris, who've shared their lives together for 54 years, finally seeing their relationship afforded the same dignity as anyone else's? That is one of our darkest moments?
Then there's Mike Huckabee, a TV personality who plays a presidential candidate every four years. He says that marriage for LGBTs is not a civil right.
"First of all, what an insult to African-Americans, who were hosed in the street, who were beaten, who were truly discriminated against with separate restrooms, separate drinking fountains, separate entrances."
Mike, discrimination isn't a contest. Nobody wins when you compete over who suffered more. It's true that African Americans have been discriminated against. Have same-sex couples experienced discrimination too? I don't know, maybe ask Anthony Sullivan and Richard Adams, who had to leave the country because they couldn't marry. The INS wrote to them that "you have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots."
Or ask all the people beaten up by police during the Stonewall Riots, or at Compton's Cafeteria, or the Black Cat, or the Castro Sweep. Or ask Clay Greene and Harold Scull, who were forcibly separated, placed into different nursing homes, and kept apart until Clay learned that his partner of 20 years had died while the government seized and sold all of their possessions.
The point is, everyone's suffered. The fact that they've suffered in different ways doesn't matter. But anti-gay politicians don't seem to get that. They keep repeating this line that racism is bad but discriminating against same-sex couples is OK because it's different. Somehow. Here's Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal:
"It's offensive to equate evangelical Christians, Catholics, and others who view marriage as between a man and a woman as being racist. We're not racist."
Ah, but he's being very tricky with his words there. Nobody is saying that Christians are racist. Nobody's even saying that Christians are bigots. A lot of Christians -- in fact, most Christians, 56 percent -- support the freedom to marry.
What we're saying it that bigotry is bigotry. And some bigots use religion to justify their bigotry. They've done it in the past with interracial marriage; and they're doing it again today.