During my short time on this Earth I’ve seen some amazing things happen — things my children will take for granted. And just as my grandparents saw equality finally given to people of all races, genders and physical conditions, I know by the end of my lifetime I will see equal rights to all men and women regardless of their sexual orientation.
The tides of change have begun to rise, and old ways will give way to the new. That’s the way it has always worked in this country.
From women protesting for the right to vote to African-Americans demanding the same treatment as their white neighbors, our country has always been ripe for change.
The beginning of the end in the latest great battle for equality began in November, as the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that homosexual couples cannot be forbidden from joining in lawful marriages under the state’s constitution. In its ruling, the court said the state legislature had six months to change the state’s laws accordingly.
The ruling was condemned by conservatives across the country, including President George W. Bush, who is now expected to back a constitutional amendment defining marriage as strictly for a man and a woman.
“Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman,” Bush said. “We must do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.”
According to the 2000 Census, there are 601,209 same-sex households in the United States, and there only is one state that currently allows same-sex civil unions, Vermont.
Vermont’s civil union law went into effect July 1, 2000, after a 1999 ruling by the state’s supreme court demanding the Vermont state legislature provide a parallel institution that conveys all the state’s rights and benefits of marriage for same-sex couples.
So in Vermont we have separate, but equal (sound familiar?).
On Feb. 4, the Massachusetts state senate asked the courts to issue an opinion on whether or not legislation supporting civil unions (like those in Vermont) would be an acceptable compromise.
The answer was a resounding no, eerily harking back to 1953’s landmark civil rights case “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan.,” the court wrote in its opinion: “The history of our nation has demonstrated that separate is seldom, if ever, equal.”
In 2000, Vermont took a step in the right direction, but today Massachusetts is blazing a trail that soon the entire country should follow behind, if we uphold a belief in equal rights.
It’s poetic justice that one repressed culture’s struggle for equality has come to a head during Black History Month. A month celebrating a race that, once discriminated against, now finds itself an equal partner.
Albeit that some may argue that African-Americans still do not have the equality they deserve. But, since the Civil Rights Acts of 1965 to 1991 (the last Civil Rights Act was signed by Bush senior), the law of the land is color blind.
I’m not saying discrimination doesn’t happen and that it won’t ever happen again. But as far as the law is concerned, all are equal.
Dr. Martin Luther King, speaking on a sweltering August day in 1963 in front of the Lincoln Memorial, quoted Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence for 200,000 of his brethren to hear, challenging America to live up to the ideals it was founded upon:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” he said in his famous “I have a dream” speech.
King didn’t finish the entire line, but it continues: “that they are endowed unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
What would happen if tomorrow, 200,000 homosexuals decided to march on Washington and tell President Bush exactly what the “pursuit of happiness,” means to them?