I posted this in another thread regarding same sex marriage, and I will post it here too. I love how everyone posting there on the side of not having equal rights just completely ignored my post. Maybe they will read it this time ^_^
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Hey, y'all! Yes, you. Everyone who voted for Proposition 8 in California, and everyone who's voted for similar measures in Arizona or elsewhere, and don't forget the people support it, the stay, and want to reverse the unconstitutional ruling. Come on down. Have a seat. Have a beer. I'd like just a moment of your time; I promise I'll go quickly, and I won't swear. Everybody with me?
It isn't every day you get a golden opportunity to hurt thousands of people who never did a thing to you, in exchange for zero benefit to yourself or to society. You sure showed those people who were just looking to share their lives with the person they love, didn't you? Awesome work, and I hate to be a party pooper at this, your great moment of triumph over the homosexuals. But today, of all days, it seems necessary to remind you of one thing that, I suspect, you already know deep down.
You're going to lose.
You do recognize that, right? I mean, 150 years ago, your philosophical forebears kept black men as slaves. A hundred years ago, your philosophical forebears outlawed marriage between a white woman and a black man. People like you denied blacks the vote, denied women the vote, tacitly allowed marital rape, segregated the schools, and burned down stores with Jewish owners. And recently, a man that people like you once enslaved, the product of a union that people like you once forbade, was elected President of the United States of America in part by citizens that people like you once disenfranchised. The slaveowners, the segregationists, the Klan, the rest of it, all of them are gone or marginalized, sad jokes, and the only thing separating you from them is just a little more time. A little.
And you do know it. I can see it in your panicky faces. You managed to get a cheap amendment passed in 2008, and now it's being appeal, a stopgap against a tide you can't stem, but you know and I know that amendments get repealed. Laws get changed. Oh, you may still have a decade, give or take, to put your pitiful boot down on a group that still distresses enough of your peers to make it unprotected.
But within your lifetime, it's going to happen. Gay men, and gay women, will be married. Not engaged in a "civil union," but married. To each other! They'll share their names, homes, and lives; they'll have the sex you can't bear to think about, in the context of a legally recognized relationship. Then, you know what they'll do? They'll adopt and raise children. They'll join the PTA at your grandkids' school. And you - as marginalized as the "separate-but-equal" shlubs became after the 60's - you'll see it happen. And you'll sit muttering into your bib about how things used to be, and members of a generation who never knew anything but equal marriage rights for all will nod politely and move away, pausing maybe to wipe the creamed corn off your chin.
It's coming, and we all know it. We know it because the natural direction of this society has always been toward more freedom, more rationality, more common decency. We move in pathetically small increments sometimes, mostly because of people like you, but we keep on moving and we're going to move right on past your outmoded mind. And there is nothing - nothing - that you can do about it.
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I'm gay by the way