COLUMN: Marriage equality is a fundamental human right
There can be no second-class citizens in a first-rate country.
Last week the residents of two western states re-affirmed the idea that marriage is a fundamental human right, one that must be made available to all people regardless of race, creed or sexual orientation.
Washington passed a bill making it the seventh state to legalize same-sex marriage. The bill will be signed into law today by Gov. Christine Gregoire.
Demonstrating that common sense can occasionally penetrate both the courts and congress, in a 2-1 decision the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals repealed California's Proposition 8.
The unconstitutional nature of the overturned amendment should be obvious at first blush. It title on ballots in 2008 was "Eliminates Rights of Same-Sex Couples to Marry." Why should government be in the business of eliminating already established civil rights? It's indefensible to make minority's legal status subject to the whims and brittle wants of the majority.
These citizens already pay taxes, raise children and serve in our armed forces, withholding official and social right of marriage because of bias is irreconcilable with the equality promised in our constitution and slowly fulfilled over two hundred years of sacrifice and struggle.
These decisions are cause for celebration for those state's residents, regardless of orientation, but they carry a depressing reminder of the patchwork inequality across our country.
Despite an important, massive generational shift in attitudes about marriage equality, in many states, including Michigan, same-sex marriage seems a long way from legal. In our own state same-sex marriage is not only legal, but banned by a constitutional amendment. The door toward progress on this issue has been slammed shut and locked, for now.
Leading the charge against equality are politicians who have decided to ignore pressing social and economic crises in order to focus on politically lucrative campaigns to ensure the continued denial of a minorities' civil rights.
Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, whose trifecta of wins in the most recent Republican primaries have placed in in the media spotlight, is running a campaign strongly focused on a brand of social conservatism intent on denying the rights of Americans because of fundamentalist and supposedly Christian values.
Santorum and other severe social conservatives will be rightly seen by future generations as desperate bigots, in the same way the racial hate speech of George Wallace and Strom Thurmond serve as an embarrassment to those who came before us.
On his campaign website Santorum writes "We can’t redefine reality to accommodate politically fashionable wishes," referring to the changing landscape of marriage equality.
Just as it was transformative, surely reality-altering for those opposed at the time, to allow interracial marriage or force integration of public schools, it's obviously absurd to suggest those who had grown stubbornly comfortable with an oppressive system were correct to hold their beliefs.
Which important steps toward equal protection failed to change reality?
Emancipation?
Abolition?
Universal suffrage?
Integration?
The inevitable progress toward marriage equality brings our forever-imperfect union a few steps closer toward guaranteeing the rights of all Americans, but we still have a long way to go.
