A friend forwarded this to me. I asked him who wrote it, but he didn't know, so I'm posting this without permission. If you know who wrote it, please let me know so that I can give them credit. It's quite a well stated summation of the case against Proposition 8 and touches on nearly all points of view expressed by the supporters of Proposition 8.

It's my personal belief that in about 2 years California will be ready (by a narrow margin) to accept gay marriage. In 10 years, about 30-40% of the country will accept it. In 40 years, no one will remember that it was ever an issue.

 

 

"First of all, I'm going to be upfront and say that I am not the most tolerant person in the world. Those who are close to me and know me well can attest to the fact that, like many Asians, I have some rather strong prejudices behind closed doors. Some of these prejudices extend to homosexuals (in particular, the physically unfit ones who deem it appropriate to prance around naked or don assless chaps and gimp masks during pride week... I don't care what you're celebrating, that's kind of gross, dude). However, despite these prejudices, I am a strong believer that everyone is entitled to certain fundamental rights. Or at the very least, that everyone ought to be entitled to the SAME rights, regardless of ethnicity, gender, creed, or sexual orientation.

Which is why I am appalled by Prop 8 and its (apparent) passage.

 

In regards to the "gay marriage will be taught in schools" and "protecting our children" opinions espoused by the Yes on 8 folks, that's nonsense meant to confuse intellectually pliable masses. Every reputable educational and child-advocate authority has said its impact in that regard will be nil. And on a personal level, I can tell you that gay and lesbian couples can be fine parents. At my last office, one of the senior partners was a lesbian and had a daughter; she and her partner were two of the best parents I'd ever known. And their daughter expressed a strong interest in boys, despite being raised by two women. Which isn't to say all gay parents are good parents-- some of them are terrible, just as there are many terrible straight parents. Good parentage isn't tied to what supposedly monolithic block of sexual orientation folks belong to, it's about their merits, their character, and their rapport with their children.

 

In regards to restoring and protecting marriage... what the hell is there to restore or protect? Even disregarding rather high divorce rates throughout the developed world, marriage at various points in time has been an ill-planned act of passion, a drunken act of stupidity, a means of forming strategic alliances, a way to avoid taxes, a vehicle for upward financial mobility, a form of bartering, and at its worst a facade for sexual abuse and domestic servitude. You want to protect it, you have protect it from EVERYONE, not a specific subset of the population.

 

A friend of mine who voted for Prop 8 responded with this: "I'm for Prop 8. Marriage = union between a man and a woman, it's in law and it's a societal definition that goes back to prehistoric times." This is perhaps true. But other ideas that have been and some that still are both legally codified and steeped in tradition: that one man can effectively own another and his children for the purposes of manual labor; that a black man is worth one 3/5ths of a white man; that a man who does not own land can be effectively disenfranchised; that women are not entitled to vote or allowed equal opportunity in education and the workplace; that a pious Muslim woman is not allowed to uncover her face or go out in public without a male family member to escort her.

Inertia is a terrible way of judging the inherent value and validity of a law; just because something exemplifies the status quo doesn't make it right.

 

Ultimately, it comes down to one issue: religion and its place in policy. I absolutely respect a religious individual's right to be privately intolerant of gays. I might poke fun at them for putting up "I kissed a girl and I liked it and then I went to hell" on the church display, but I absolutely respect their right to speak their mind.

What I don't respect is the idea that religious beliefs ought to have any discernible impact on the implementation and execution of law. The constitution is VERY clear on separation of church and state.

 

One argument I've seen put forth is that marriage is a religious union, sanctified by a church, and it's illegal for the government to force churches to do anything against their beliefs. I agree that the separation of church and state goes both ways, but it is my ardent belief that marriage is a civil union with religious origins, not one that still has inherently religious underpinnings. Despite not being religious, I very much intend to get married at some point. The ceremony may be performed by a minister and within the confines of a church, but if that's the case, it'll be more on account of tradition than faith. And hell, I might chose to circumvent that entirely by walking down to city hall and getting legally married sans wedding march spectacle and open bar. By the same argument made against gay marriage, you could say that straight agnostics and atheists can't get married. And when the basis of an argument can so broadly be used to impinge on the rights of a large subset of the population, I believe people are assigning religious import where it doesn't belong.

 

I expect many people are going to say that ultimately this doesn't matter, since domestic partners in California are afforded pretty much all the same rights as a married couple. But there are both practical and more principled implications of Prop 8. On a pragmatic level, even though in California it'd just be a title, the bestowal of that title indicates significant change in the way people view homosexuality. And that change could have inspired similar laws in other states, as California tends to be a trendsetter in law (see: Prop 13). If nothing else, some of those states might at least recognize domestic partnerships and afford gay couples SOME sort of legal protections as civil entities.

 

On a more abstract level, the debate harkens to the same principle as that in the Brown v. The Board of Education decision. In that case, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP specifically chose a school district where black facilities and quality of education were essentially on par with that of whites. That's pretty much the exact dichotomy between "marriage" and "civil unions" in California: two groups operating under the same rules but with a clear and distinct legal delineation between the two. The point isn't that the black education was worse (although in many other parts of the country, it was) or that gays don't have the same rights (although in much of the country they don't). The point is that separate but equal is INHERENTLY unequal, even in cases where it truly is separate but equal. I had hoped that 54 years hence we'd have learned that lesson, but it looks like the wait will have to last at least a little while longer."