Civil Rights

While I was overjoyed to see Barrack Obama voted into office, one thing has soured the experience for me - one thing has robbed the victory of some portion of its sweetness. In my home state of California, prop 8, the constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriages, passed.

There have been massive protests ever since.

Today I heard on the news that, across the state, city and local officials are joining the protest against Prop 8, working to see this gross injustice overturned. I have never been prouder of them in my life.

The issue of whether or not homosexual couples should be allowed to marry is not a matter of religious conviction, but rather of secular conviction: it is a matter of convictions which, uttered at the dawn of our nation's history, hold no less true today. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..."

This is about civil rights. This is about the necessary separation of Church and State. This is about whether or not it is acceptable in a free society for a majority to strip civil rights from a minority; in the same faith with which our founders penned those mighty words, we assert that it is not. We have seen too much to believe for even a moment that the desire of the majority - 'separate but equal' - is anything less than institutionalized injustice, and in unified spirit with Doctor Martin Luther King Jr and every civil rights leader who ever stood up for a despised minority, we hold to the faith that though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends towards justice in the end.