The Bigger Picture

As I said in my first post, I am worried. I am worried that people cannot see the bigger picture. It could easily be argued that this proposition is not about gay marriage at all. It's about democracy and human rights. If Prop 8 passes, we will have effectively eliminated the right of a minority group to enjoy a freedom that is enjoyed by the vast majority of the population. And if we can eliminate the civil rights of one minority, who's to say who's next? I truly believe that no matter what you think about gay marriage, you should be worried that instead of expanding rights, we are eliminating them. It's a dangerous precedent to write discrimination into the constitution (state or federal). The role of a democracy is to protect the minority from the majority.

"History is replete with examples of advances in civil rights that would not have been tolerated had they been put to a popular vote," wrote Kathleen O'Connor, president of the Women's Bar Association, about the petition by 170,000 Massachusetts voters for a constitutional amendment defining marriage. Brown vs. Board of Education is one that comes to mind. It was a landmark decision that established that school segregation of black and white children was inherently unequal. This sounds so logical today, some 50 years later, but it was not what the popular majority favored at the time.

Martin Luther King wrote, "It is an historical fact that privileged groups rarely give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture, but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals” For this reason civil rights have historically been ensured first by the courts, and only later accepted by society at large. The courts’ mission, to make sure that constitutions are upheld, is different from that of the Legislature, which must, as an elected body, reflect the popular view. (These last two sentences were taken from a letter to the editor published in the Hampshire Gazette in December 2003).

So do four judges (whose appointments are approved every year by the voters in the state of CA) have the right to decide that outlawing same-sex marriage is a violation of civil rights? Absolutely. Just because the the popular majority thinks something is right doesn't make it so.