i used to be just a personal blog. i used to be allll about me & occasionally about my computer, and for some reason it feels a little odd to shift focus like this, especially to a single issue, social &/or political. demonstrating this, i start this post out talking more about me, me, me. yeah, it’s all about … to change. well, not all. but this is change. i’m a lizard, i kick the habit, shed my skin.

trying to figure out why it is i’ve attached myself to the cause of marriage equality. best excuse reason i can come up with is, this is my civil rights movement. i was approximately 2.5 years of age when Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in the march on Washington. although i did (in my own, elementary school periphery) follow the civil rights movement, i did not live in an atmosphere that encouraged that. my parents would never, not in a bazillion years attended a protest, let alone taken me to one. but in my own, ADD-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye-distracted-daydreamy type of way, i did follow. i did also spectate the summer of love, at age six & living just across the bay from San Francisco, watching the hippies on the news and … daydreaming. & as soon as i was old enough to think up reasonable reasons to do so, i would take the bus down Bancroft Avenue & end up in Berkeley in People’s Park hanging out with vagrants & students (& chemists, ok? they had some talent there in the seventies, let me tell you). i have always been a counterculture wannabe.

& that part of me that always wanted to be is both delighted & honored to find my self, at my age, with a cause that is every bit as important as the struggles of the 60′s and 70′s, & (having had a life of major fuckup-related stress distractions in the interim), excited to finally be able to join a movement about something important & have that matter, even if only in the most infinitesimal way. because, what we have here before us today is an era in which the grassroots movement has been proven, in a decisive & undeniable way, to be the absolute perfect way to get shit done. we put an African-American in the White House because he was the right (electable) person for the job, how hard does that rock? in a less imperfect world, that wouldn’t have been a big deal but in this one? yeah. “Congratulations on being a part of the decision that made this nation move well and with style.” oh you betcha. this is the new stuff, i go dancing in …

so in this new nation in which we can move with such style, well, what now? nothing rhetorical about that question, seriously, i’m asking … what next? i’ve joined some groups & signed up for some things. i’ve been to the first protest of my life, and i brought my kids (including my 11 year old’s friend who was over for the day & we all agreed we didn’t need to mention this to his mom because she over-reacts). yeah, i snuck a tweenager over to a gay marriage rally because he personally believed in it & i want to encourage that kind of rebellion. also, i’ve always been the ‘cool mom’, the one that would rather be talked to than lied to. and in my daughter’s adolescence that also made me the one that got the calls from VPD at one in the morning, & i held my counsel, & continued to be the one that wasn’t lied to, & that’s another story entirely. i digress, but i always digress, so … deal with it.

i’ll repeat the question, what’s next? i do not require answers but appreciate them where applicable. i myself will continue to do what i do best, ping things & join things & make what noise i have time to make, which might not be all that much, considering. my point, if a rambling thing like this blog post has such a thing, is that i have found my cause, my civil rights movement, my larger thing in which i might be a very small part & have that matter, no matter how much.

i have to digress one more time, i would apologize but i’m not particularly sorry. you know who would make a great Secretary of State? John McCain. you know who would make a great Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare? Hillary Clinton. feel free to yell at me about that, or about digressing in such a completely random & less-than-sensical fashion. make some noise!

civil rights. human rights. inalienable rights. it’s what this great country was founded on, well, that and the graves of the natives we slaughtered so we’d have plenty of room to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. hey, our creator endowed us. US. not them.

it’s human nature to want human rights, and it is also human nature to deny those rights to other humans. how do those who struggle against the rights of others manage to reconcile this in their minds? not just a few stray assholes, mind you.  we’re talking a massive coalition of churches pooling their considerable resources have their opinions written into the rule of law.  “So far, Proposition 8 supporters have poured $19,778,208 to outlaw same-sex marriage, about $1.6 million more than opponents of the measure. Add the two sides together and that’s about $38 million. Imagine the good it could be doing elsewhere.”

so much good that could be done, but instead it’s just the same old evil, the latest in a long history of religious persecutors, fighting these battles along the increasingly blurry line between church and state, bleating about the need to protect the institution of marriage against the ‘wrong people’ getting into it. they do this in the same spirit we used to enforce similar protections against people of color sharing schools, bathrooms, and water fountains, insisting they were ‘separate but equal’.   “California law already grants domestic partners all the rights that a state can grant to a married couple. Gays have a right to their private lives, but not to change the definition of marriage for everyone else.” i thought we covered the whole “separate is inherently unequal” thing way back in Brown v. Board of education, but perhaps not.

marriage can hardly be called a privilege. it’s as much a right as anything else that we’re entitled to do once we reach a certain age. you don’t have to pass a written exam or a road test, you simply present yourself at the courthouse with proper ID, a pulse, and $45, and they’ll issue you a license to wed. hell, death row inmates are allowed to marry, and they are considered property of the state — they don’t even have the right to their own lives, but they can be married in the eyes of god and the government.

my anger (and there is quite a lot of it) stems from the unimaginable arrogance inherent in excluding any minority from anything based solely on their status as a member of that minority. the religious reich, citing the bible, channeling mein kampf. not that i’m making comparisons between our modern godly persecutors and nazi germany! oh hell no! hitler had lousy P.R. people. ‘family values’ would have been a much more effective tagline than ‘master race’. ok, ok, calm down, i am not comparing discrimination to genocide. they are completely different things. totally unrelated. nothing to do with one another. except, you know, the hate. it takes a powerful amount of hate to operate under the set of presumptions necessary to conceive of, and campaign for, something as devastating as Prop 8. these people have nothing personal to be protected against, and no reason other than this hate to fight against the rights of others (it’s not like the law is trying to force churches to perform gay marriages, that’s actually quite unnecessary — there are plenty of churches that will willingly and joyfully officiate over these vows).

the truth is that there are many, many good christians who oppose Prop. 8. there are even organized religious groups who have spoken out against Prop 8. in fact, i feel ridiculously grateful to any and all who have taken a stand against this abomination against humanity and enlightenment and love, because historically, any time a determined group of individuals has dedicated itself to systematically denying the rights of another group of people, it’s been a hell of a fight to set things right.

even if you don’t live in california, you can still speak out against this. the struggle for civil rights affects us all. even if you don’t believe in gay marriage, you can still speak out against this, because it is not about gayness, or really even about marriage — it’s about rights.