isn’t that a great name for a Supreme Court case? i thought so.

what i thought even more amazing was this text, from the decision:

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 discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

and with that, in 1964, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was overturned, once and for all. the anti-miscegenation laws are now far behind us, but do you know that until 1991, we would not have had a voting majority to agree. i’m very glad that interracial couples did not have to wait until 1991 for the general public (who are notorious assholes, as a group) to agree that it was ok for them to have this ‘basic civil right’.

quote, and Supreme Court case, discovered reading Robot Monkey Pants.

i missed most of it. and for this, i suffered the loss of the full experience, and i regret it. however, considering i was up most of the night before with the heat & the winds & the allergies that felt like a flu, i accept that i did what i could. got up, got some Zyrtec (amazing stuff, fixed me right up), cleaned the car (it was bad), packed it with me & some kids, headed down to Mission Park right around the time the main protest was supposed to be ending.

it did not end then, nor had it ended by the time i left, an hour & a half after that. a core group of energetic anti-haters stayed and stayed and chanted and chanted and passers-by either honked & waved & thumbs-upped, or (and there were less of these) averted their eyes & pretended we were not there.

but we were there, we will be here, and we will not go away. ever. so get used to it.

we found this sign, adopted it, waved it, and passed it on to others when we left.

i missed so much, but i still came away with such a feeling of love and pride. my two sons came with me, along with their friends. we waved signs, we chanted chants, we talked to some amazing people. and do you know what? there were more straight people there than not. there was such an amazing variety of right-thinking humans there making their voices heard for what is right. there were families, kids, grandmas, teenagers, and a drag queen or two in full regalia (assuring his friend that he was indeed wearing panties under his short skirt). there was a pretty young dark-haired girl who did not appear to know anyone there, with a small homemade sign saying Prop 8 was unfair & wrong. she did not wave it, nor chant; she stood off to the side with her sign, alone, not interacting with anyone, just being there for the cause. i refrained from taking her picture, it would have been intrusive i think, for she radiated shyness.  and i might respect her most of all, just for getting out, just for showing up, just for standing up for what is right even though she was doing this, in her own world, all by herself.

because as i, and my children, and everyone who attended this rally today know, there is only one right thing, and that is our rights. civil rights, human rights. anything that everyone but a select few can do, is a right. anything that any minority is excluded from based solely on their status as a member of that miniroty, is a right that is unfairly granted to all who enjoy it. it’s in the California constitution, still: “A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens.” they didn’t amend that with Prop 8. they can’t. the fight is not over, yet. but there is no doubt in my mind that right will prevail.

you know, i love it when i hear someone joking that they approve of gay marriage because ‘everyone should be just as miserable as i am’. it acknowledges the inherent rightness of equality, while using humor to dispel any lingering discomfort with the concept of gay marriage, which is fairly recent, at least in this iteration of civilization. i choose to see humor as progress.

today i had many conversations in several venues, and in order to make my point and get my facts straight, i did a lot of research, and i learned many things. in case this helps, here are some rational, fact-based responses if you are ever up against these misconceptions:

MYTH: marriage is a religious concept and has always been between a man and a woman.
FACT: marriage predates recorded history, but the earliest known traditions in Greco-Roman times were intended to define who got the dowry, who inherited what, and who was the boss of who. and yes, there were same-sex unions. they followed more or less the same patterns, with one partner (the male, in a male/female marriage) would be older, and the younger partner (usually the woman) would be passed from the control of father, to that of the spouse.

so, marriage then, as now, was a very similar and mostly practical arrangement. it was about property rights, social position, defining the shift from being your parents’ child to forming your own family, and how many goats that was gonna cost one of your dads. and of course commitment and love. and if not for love, at least for some sort of strategic alliance. religion got involved much later on and acted like it invented the concept, but no.

MYTH: civil unions are just as good as marriage.
FACT: only a handful of states offer civil unions. many who do, specifically refuse to recognize the civil unions of other states. civil unions do not convey the same rights to pensions and security benefits and do not establish “kinship”, which marriage does. marriage creates familial relation between unrelated people, and this kinship is recognized across state and international borders. why can’t we extend this to civil unions? well, that it would have to be enacted at the federal level, which violates state’s rights – and states still decide who marries. it would certainly be a daunting legal challenge, and it would still carry the ‘separate but equal’ stigma.

MYTH: the majority in California has spoken, and they have rejected gay marriage
FACT: there are serious constitutional issues surrounding the passage of Proposition 8. it was put on the ballot as an amendment, rather than a revision, to the constitution. by law, an amendment is a simple change to one section of the constitution, while a revision is a more complex and far-reaching change, sometimes to multiple sections at once. even though Proposition 8 only added 14 words to one section, it revokes the rights of a “suspect class”, which is a legally recognized minority. by law, matters pertaining to suspect classes must fall under the “strictest scrutiny”, and (as the lawyers are now arguing), this makes Prop 8 a revision, which would need a 2/3 vote in the House and then a majority of citizen votes.

a little history: in 2000, the voters approved a ban on gay marriage. the Supreme Court overturned this ban (after ruling that gays are a suspect class), and that the ban unconstitutionally discriminated against them under section 7(b), which states, “A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens.” this is why proposition 8 was placed on the ballot as an amendment. they couldn’t pass an unconstitutional law, so they changed the constitution. and there’s a good chance they did that in an unconstitutional fashion.

MYTH: without Proposition 8, churches would be forced to marry gays, or face sanctions
FACT: the state’s role in marriage is very limited: they issue the license which is necessary to create a legal and binding contract out of a ceremony of the couple’s choice. they also enforce the legal provisions to the contract, and decide who gets the house, the kids, and the goats, should the parties decide they want out of the contract. it’s this contract that same-sex couples are denied the right to, there’s nothing sacred about it. there is no stipulation that requires that the contract be blessed by a religious institution – yes it’s true, atheists are allowed to marry. the couple can choose to be married by a judge, a magistrate, a ‘marriage commissioner’, or of course a member of the clergy. some California counties even have a “deputy for a day” program that allows non-clergy friends and relatives to officiate at a wedding. your pet psychic could be ordained by the Universal Life Church and marry you while channeling your dearly departed cat. tom cruise could marry you on his yacht, where he achieves the highest possible operating thetan level. the possibilities are endless. the sacredness, or lack thereof, is up to the individuals involved.

the bottom line is, no church could be forced to perform a gay marriage. that would be unconstitutional.

ok, that’s enough for now. there will be more, oh yes.

a wise woman once advised me that to get a message across, it is necessary to repeat it again and again until people hear it in their sleep. so here it is: “A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens.”

i will confess i suffered a rather painful shock, last tuesday, when i clicked over from the transcendent presidential election victories to check the returns on the the fight against prop 8 to find it up by a good 10 points in the early returns. i could not imagine why it was doing so well, in an election where liberal candidates and causes were prevailing by a decisive margin. we came out to vote for hope, what the hell happened to hope?

i thought we would beat it. i really did. it’s simple logic! the arguments for it made little sense, and were universally untrue. there was no threat to marriage, to children, to churches. nothing bad was going to suddenly start happening, the only possible result was that nothing would change, that people who had civil rights in california would continue having those rights. simple! logic! the thought that the electorate would come out in favor of writing discrimination into the constitution seemed surreal, especially in the context this historic election.

and then i clicked over to the exit polls and suffered a second shock, looking at the demographics – the highest percentages (in the early exit polls) of yes votes cast against the civil rights of their fellow citizens were people of color, the african-american and latino voters. this made the least sense of anything (to me, at least). why would people who knew firsthand the pain of discrimination and the struggle to be granted the same rights as everyone else suddenly decide that, while civil rights are nice and all, that they’re just not for everybody? now, we know that even if these percentages were reversed, that it would not have changed the outcome, it just … it did not make sense to me.

so i asked this question on Plurk, and what resulted was a very long and very educational thread, the gist of which i shall attempt to convey here, in hopes it somehow helps:

what we had, was a failure to communicate. “…the commercials that were EVERYWHERE kept talking about how this was going to be taught in schools, how it was going to take 501C status from churches etc. And they kept saying it over and over. Those people KNEW what they were doing. Nothing is more sacred to black people (I’m one) than children and church.They didn’t say . . . look if you talk about HIV at school you have to SIGN a WAIVER, if you talk about puberty at school you have to SIGN a WAIVER of permission. So, there is NO WAY they will teach this “gay marriage” without YOU the parent knowing about it . . . cause we don’t do that here. This is for CIVIL marriages . . . if a church does not want to do the marriage they are PROTECTED and NOTHING will happen to them. And you have to say it over and over and over and over again. Like Obama had to do with the message of cutting taxes for 95% of Americans. He said it over and over again until we could hear it in our sleep.”

and you know, Telemill, who i’m quoting here, is absolutely right, although it took me awhile to catch on. i argued that yes we had said those things! and i went back and i looked at the commercials. and you know what? we actually kind of did say them, only … well, not really. the other side told their lies with precisely engineered emotional propaganda, like a wide-eyed, innocent child, “mommy, today i learned a prince can marry a prince.” we, on the other hand, got some politicians to dryly explain the facts, who listens? and then we had samuel l. jackson on repeat for the last few days before the election, talking about the wrongness of denying rights in terms of internment camps, interracial marriage, armenian home ownershsip. why did this message not ring true to those who had shared that pain, those struggles? what would cause them to come out heavily in favor of changing the constitution to revoke the rights of a minority, based solely on their status as a member of that minority?

it’s so simple: family. church. the important things, the things that sustain you when the society you live in treats you like a lesser human. and the other side, they knew this. as Telemill explains it, “You WERE up against them . . . conservatives I mean . . . but they knew they couldn’t do it themselves so they said, what would get the minority vote against them? Hmmm. . . I know . . . children. Let’s say that it will affect their children (you have the black vote and Latino vote with that one). OK, and then let’s say it will affect their church! (Catholic Latinos and Devote Christian Blacks will go nuts). They knew EXACTLY what message to through out there. And gay citizens were ignorant of that technique. Black people know it well . . . we’re just used to the conservatives pushing it OUR way, it’s different when on the other side of the coin.”

Mark Morford put it this way: “And I must say — and you might not want to hear this — a big chunk of blame for 8′s passage has to go to the No on 8 campaign’s initial arrogance, followed by their utterly limp reaction when the Yes campaign started attacking and gaining real steam. As one of my politically savvy Chronicle colleagues put it, ‘No on 8 was a bad campaign. Bad bad bad. Inept, amateurish, incompetent and, above all, guilty of committing the first and worst sin of politics: taking the voters for granted.’”

i admit it: i am guilty of complacency and naiveté, and of astonishing ignorance to the factors that ultimately motivated the voters. i am guilty of not knowing the enemy, and not seeing how well the enemy knew me and mine. and evidence suggests i was nowhere near alone in these failings. i know these are harsh words, and how dare i criticize the good people who fought a fair fight and got beaten by cheaters? yes. i have a lot of nerve, especially when you consider this is not my cause, in that i am a straight, white, middle-aged geek, fully endowed with all my inalienables: life, liberty, the pursuit, all that. but since this ridiculous travesty in which out of state religious interests have succeeded in imposing their bullshit on the constitution of my state, causing immeasurable harm to so many of my fellow californians, to my friends … well, forgive me if i’m so pissed off i’ve decided to barge on in and see if maybe i can help figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

it is possible i have no business opining these opinions. feel free to point this out, i’ll listen. meanwhile, i remain hopeful that these harsh lessons will serve us well as we continue this fight. as Telemill tells it, “…you must look at it this way. You lost for fight by a very SLIM margin when the enemy used LIES and dirty tactics. That means that people didn’t ACTUALLY turn their back on you. It means YOUR COMMUNITY didn’t fight HARD ENOUGH, didn’t push back enough You can never let up. You have to push back. Power never secedes . . . remember that. The small margin loss means the dawn is there . . . you are almost there.”

ok. so, what’s next?

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.