For Shame

Never before have I been so ashamed to be from Florida. Not during the 2000 election debacle; not when confronted by the fact that FARK has given it its own tag; not ever.

Today, I hang my head and consider disavowing my home State. On the ballot this year, along with President, along with Congressmen, along with countless State and local officials, there was an amendment to the State Constitution to define marriage as being only between a man and a woman. To deny marriage rights to an entire section of people. I am ashamed because it passed. It more than passed. It won by a sizable margin. It won in every single precinct. Overwhelmingly, my fellow Floridians decided that if you love someone of the same gender, you don’t deserve the same rights as the rest of us. You are worth less as a citizen. You don’t get the same protection under the law, even if we have to change the highest law in the State to make it so.

There is a video on YouTube of a commercial for Proposition 8 (the CA version of the same amendment), where someone has replaced the words “same-sex” with “interracial” in the arguments for Prop 8. There is no rational way to listen to it and maintain that it is not base discrimination. Most of the arguments are even the same ones used in 1958 when Loving v. Virginia was being heard and talked about. In that judgment, the court wrote:

“Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... 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. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

How can we say that this could not have been written about homosexuals? How can we say that sexual orientation is not protectable? How can we as a people have come far enough to elect a president who is a product of just such a marriage, and yet deny marriage rights so analogous? It makes me weep. I weep for the present, but I hope for the future, for I have learned from the past.