We are living in troubling times. We’re
in a war without an end. We’re in Iraq on a lie. We have a runaway deficit
that promises
to get worse if we don’t alter our course. There
are more Americans out of work than in anytime in previous history, and
we have
lost jobs we’ll never regain to lands and workers
far from our shores.
The USA Patriot Act has annihilated seven of our
ten Bill of Rights. We are on constant alert for dangers untold and unknown.
We have record numbers of illiterate citizens.
We have hungry, abused, and fatherless children in numbers nearly incalculable.
There are new names for old groups and old groups
disguised as new.
The glorification of God is politically-prudent,
publicly acceptable, and the converse is shunned and spat upon; the battle
of evolution
versus divinity is the rave; Puritanism and hypocrisy
threatens to tear us asunder. The concept of tolerance is null and void.
Forgiveness
and compassion have gone by the wayside. Bigotry,
Anti-Semitism, and a lack of civility are at all-time highs.
We are facing times that will test our strength,
our humanity, and our courage. We have but to open our newspaper or turn
on our
news to see faces staring back at us that are
starving, frightened, sick, and diseased. We watch as earthquakes destroy
entire villages,
as volcanoes erupt, and natural disasters obliterate
towns.
We watch seemingly helpless as AIDS wipes out
whole communities, and are horrified to learn that 28-million people around
the
world are infected with HIV. We’re aghast to
see new and old diseases erupt around the world. Diphtheria becomes epidemic
in
the Soviet Union; tens of thousands of cats are
destroyed as suspected agents of SARS; and multitudes of poultry are euphemized
for fear of a demonic bird flu.
Measles takes the lives of well over one-million
youngsters every year. Tens of millions of people are afflicted with the
mosquito-borne
Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever; it’s endemic in Africa,
Asia, and the Caribbean. We’re appalled when we learn that water used by
half
the world’s people kills three-million children
a year because it’s contaminated.
Korea threatens to build a nuclear bomb; Iran
reportedly is covertly building theirs. An extremely deadly form of Mousepox
is
created by a government-funded scientist; a deadly
horse virus kills 50 to 70 per cent of humans who contract the disease.
The rich are getting richer, the middle-class
is nearly extinct, and the poor are poorer. One-hundred-and-eighty-million
people in the
world are without a job - 550-million people
worldwide earn $1 or less a-day.
The Equator is growing smaller, the Poles are
melting, the continent-size hole in the Earth’s ozone layer keeps getting
bigger and bigger,
and we still don’t know who draws the crop circles
in the earth.
You might think with all these horrifying, amazing,
and stunning realities, we would be concerned and searching for the answers
and
the remedies to these really important issues.
But nay, our president, in his State of the Union address, deemed athletes’
steroid
drug use and non-heterosexual marriages two of
his top priorities.
In his Address, President Bush, the “Compassionate
Conservative”, who invokes the name of the Lord in every public speech
he makes,
asked citizens to help him fight against activist
judges who are attempting to redefine marriage by court order and destroy
the “sanctity of marriage”.
The scourge of his condemnation is directed to
a large sector of alternative lifestyle partners. Couples who are no less
loving, no less devoted
to one another than the ‘sanctified’ couples
President Bush considers endorsed by God and who are one with his interpretation
of the Bible.
Republican lawmakers in nine of the thirty-seven
states that have “Defense of Marriage” acts are not satisfied with their
existing laws.
Vigorously and voraciously the neocons and paleocons
are campaigning to their Christian constituents that any union of same
sex partners
is an abomination and as such, new, more stringent
laws need to be enacted. After all, Gay couples in marriage are a threat
to God-fearing
Christians everywhere. Every one knows that!
Same sex couples have been living as married couples
for centuries. But they have been doing so without the federal benefits
automatically
afforded legal heterosexual unions. Gay couples
are denied the very basic laws dignifying their communion.
Without the legal union, Gay couples cannot avail
themselves to a single one of the 1,049 laws and benefits automatically
entitled by marriage
in the Federal system, including: entitlement
to bereavement leave; automatic inheritance; domestic violence protection;
immunity against testifying
against their spouse, joint bankruptcy; wrongful
death benefits; or loss of consort benefits, and that’s just the tip of
this proverbial iceberg.
No president should be entitled to determine who
is a couple and who is not; nor should the Federal Government or individual
states,
for that matter. We need to embrace every citizen
and fight for their individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness. This should
include the union and recognition of all loving
relationships in marriage whether Gay, Lesbian, or Heterosexual.
This is not the first time extremists have pitted
man against man and woman against woman. In 1919, there arose a religious
wail that alcohol
would be our damnation. It wasn’t until 1933,
that Prohibition was repealed. There have been other fights. The Suffrage
Movement fought
for fifty long years, for the right for women
to vote, but also for basic rights such as: property rights; employment
and educational opportunities;
divorce and child custody laws; and increased
social freedoms. Sound familiar?
It wasn’t until 1954 that the NAACP won a landmark
case that paved the way for large-scale desegregation in schools. A year
later, in 1955,
Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the
bus; in 1964, nine years afterwards, civil rights groups converged on the
Democratic National
Convention, launching a monumental protest to
register black voters. That same year, on July 2nd, President Lyndon B.
Johnson signed the
historic Civil Rights Act presumably ending segregation
in public facilities and discrimination in employment.
But the fight for the right to marry inter-racially
is the battle that most closely defines the present-day struggle for recognition
of same-sex
marriage. Arguments that sound eerily indistinguishable
from those applied to same-sex unions, “immoral” and “unnatural”, were
decried
in reference to inter-racial marriages.
As late as 1948, thirty-eight states still forbade
marriages of mixed-colors. Not until 1967, when the Supreme Court declared
that “the
“freedom to marry” belonged to all Americans;
that marriage is one of our “vital personal rights”, and that the right
to marry is “essential
to the orderly pursuit of happiness by a free
[people]”, were inter-racial couples free to wed.
One last ditch fight was overturned, but not without
a valiant effort by a Virginia judge who withheld his state’s ban on inter-racial
marriages
citing that it was, “Gods intention to separate
the races”. Today, the “Defense of Marriage Act” regarded in esteem by
George W. Bush and
the far right, should be held to the same stringent
principles as proclaimed by the Supreme Court in 1967.
Definitively, the similarities are strikingly undeniable.
Most of us would agree the battle for equality
still goes on. We have a long and illustrious history of separatism and
superiority. There has
always been a fanatical segment of the population
that equates equality for others as a loss to their conceived elitist position.
How else can
one explain the purpose for keeping women from
voting and from being recognized as equal; for keeping blacks second-class
citizens devoid
of their civil rights and diminishing their dignity;
for preventing same sex couples from the laws of marriage that would afford
them recognition
as a lawful uniting and the benefits therein?
This single issue unites all fair-minded individuals
throughout our land. Presidential candidate’s Kucinich, Dean, and Kerry
have all vowed
their protection under our Constitution and our
civil rights laws to the dignity of marriage to all couples no matter their
sexual orientation.
If the denial of a legalized union of two loving
individuals, if fear of the abolishment of our civil liberties in the USA
Patriot Acts, and if fear
of the diminishing jobs for American workers,
and unaffordable medical care, and an affordable drug plan for every citizen
isn’t enough to
motivate the citizenry to join together to take
back our country, then we are destined to follow our leader into a deep,
putrid morass
without any hope of salvation.
It is time to celebrate our differences, honor
one another, delight in the joy of harmony, smile as we gaze upon a loving
couple - any couple.
And, if it be our only option, we should join
hands, stand shoulder to shoulder and fight for equality and dignity for
all humankind.
© Norma Sherry 2004
Norma Sherry is co-founder of TogetherForeverChanging.org, an organization
devoted to educating, stimulating, and igniting personal
responsibility particularly with regards to our diminishing civil liberties.
She is also an award-winning writer/producer and host of upcoming
television program, The Norma Sherry Show on WQXT TV.
Email Norma: norma@togetherforeverchanging.org