The Nov. 7 election wasn’t unlike a big gala where all the giddy guests wander away after the gaieties rung in by the Obama election and congressional ousters of those who supported the Bush regime. As that last guest leaves and the balloons begin to float back to Earth from the ceiling, one of the guests stays behind, devestated.
In the good time America had in watching the country lurch ahead, tens of thousands of California residents were kicked in the face by voters insisting on illogical discrimination against gays and lesbians.
The irony is tragic. In a state where even the Republican governor supports the rights of gays to marry, a state that clinched the Barack Obama presidency, blowing the lid off of eons of bigotry and discrimination, just over half the voters in the state denied equal rights and liberties to their homosexual neighbors.
It looked like America had moved so far last week. But it just wasn’t far enough.
Americans just can’t shake off their odd preoccupation with sex and especially the sex lives of others.
Just like other minorities before them, the vote seeks to dehumanize gays and lesbians, trivializing their quest for equality by marginalizing their rank in society. Maybe not this year, but soon, and more and more people will understand that our gay and lesbian neighbors are us, just as are Americans who are disabled, Spanish-speaking, old or white.
Just as those realizations about blacks and other minorities eventually made interracial marriage legal and segregation unconstitutional, I’m convinced that Americans will eventually see discrimination against gays for the folly it is.
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