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Nearly half a century after the Supreme Court lifted bans on interracial marriage nationwide, it has now just lifted bans on same sex marriage across America. Lets be clear, 50 years ago the President's parents would not have been able to marry in nearly half the states in our nation. The President's parents married in Hawaii in 1961, a state that had never enacted an anti-miscegenation law. His mom's home state, Kansas, lifted its ban on interracial marriage in 1948. The last state to do that was Alabama which did so in 2000, imagine!
In late April, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about allowing Same Sex Marriage to become the law of the land or not. According to the recounting of our day in court, they talked about the traditions of aboriginals in the Kalahari desert, and millennia old mores; all this at the dawn of the third millennium. Fifty or a hundred years from now, folks will shake their heads in disbelief that there was such a serious discourse on something so self evident as equal rights. In the future they'll be arguing about the rights of robots to marry, no doubt. And what about the rights of gay and transgender robots! Will they be giving impeccably clever logical software responses to questions about their hardware?
Whilst our highest most infallible civil court engaged in dead serious deliberation grappling with the gravity of superstition and exclusion, meanwhile in May, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg married his same sex partner in a rite attended by European heads to state, royalty, and surely the gay Prime Minister of Belgium and the former lesbian Prime Minster of Iceland and her wife. Iceland! And in Ireland, a conservative Catholic country, two thirds of that nation's voters voted to enshrine same sex marriage into their sacred constitution! The 'Yes' vote was supported by all of the country's political parties. Ireland!
So what now? Incensed opponents, who seem not to have lives of their own to live, are fulminating with livid fury, red faced, billowing steam from their ears, and shaking spittle from their jowls as they howl in indignant unrighteous outrage. Far right red faced red state representatives have been plotting for months in anticipation of equality, conjuring convoluted legislation to delegitimize our newly gained enfranchisement.
So, sadly, after we celebrate and march with joyous abandon in pride parades, its back to the barricades, because the battle isn't over. To paraphrase Churchill, this is not the beginning of the end, it is only the end of the beginning of our battle for freedom. As was the clarion cry of protest in San Francisco in the seventies, its back to "out of the bars and into the streets" demanding our rights again and again; because we're not going to wait another fifty years for full equality.
If we are good enough to fight and die for our nation, we're good enough to live and love in freedom!
-Sgt First Class Denny Meyer
Gay Vietnam Era Veteran
single and available
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