Equality: A Struggle for Americans Today

I believe that all people, regardless of age, race, religion or orientation, are equal and should be treated so. And it pains me that in the United States, a country that prides itself on being a progressive society that has championed civil liberties, has denied a particular group of its citizens their liberty. I am talking about the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California.

On November 4, 2008, immediately following the announcement of Sen. Barrack Obama as the new president of the U.S., words of congratulation were given from leaders across the world. Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, said that Obama’s victory was in line with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of men and women not being judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Kenya Prime Minister Ralla Odinga said that Obama;s election was a “strong message of hope” and his character has inspired people around the world.

“The people of Kenya wish the president-elect and the people of America every success in their endeavors in the years to come. There can be no doubt that America is indeed a ‘nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’” – Prime Minister Ralla Odinga

Funny that as the United States was being praised for electing its first African American president, showing equality among all U.S. citizens, Californians were voting on whether or not to take away the right for gay and lesbian couples to be married. And even though California has long been thought to be a progressive state, a state that welcomes people in with open arms, its citizens chose to take away this right.

And while I was rejoicing over the historic occasion of Obama’s election and for a real chance for change in the United States, I was sick to hear that a terrible change would be made to California’s state constitution—one that would take away the civil liberties of a group of people because of their sexual orientation.

This discrimination must stop. For years, the people of the United States have discriminated against minorities. It took the country until the year 1865 with the ratification of the 13th Constitutional Amendment to end slavery—though most states had already ended slavery, either by their own action or under Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863—and then another three years until the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection of the law to every U.S. citizen regardless of race and color. Up until 1967, it was illegal for people of different races to marry under anti-miscegenation laws.

It took the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia of 1967 to finally make interracial marriage legal. In this landmark civil rights case, the Supreme Court ruled that Virginia’s “Racial Integrity Act of 1924” was unconstitutional (overturning the Pace v. Alabama case of 1883). The Racial Integrity Act required that every person’s racial description was to be taken at birth and made marriages between white and non-white people a felony. Virginia’s legislature rationalized the anti-miscegenation laws by citing eugenics, a theory that said hereditary disorders, flaws and unwanted characteristics could be eliminated by selective breeding and social engineering.

Basically, Virginia reasoned that in order to improve the human race, white people should only mate with other white people so as to not introduce any “unwanted characteristics”. (However, a “Pocahontas exception” was included, since many upper class families claimed to be decedents from Pocahontas; a person would be considered white if they had one-sixteenth Indian ancestry or less.)

The case revolved around the arrest of the Lovings (Mildred, a African American and Native American woman, and Richard, a white man) who had been arrested and sentenced to one year in prison (though their sentence was suspended when they were asked to move out of the state). The filed suit, saying that the ground on which their “crime” was based directly conflicted with the 14th Amendment. The case was brought to the Supreme Court where a unanimous decision was made to overturn the Lovings’ convictions. The court said that both the Due Process and the Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment were violated.

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

So how is it constitutional to deny this “basic civil right” of marriage to same-sex partners, especially after same-sex couples were allowed to marry for a short time in California?

On May 15, 2008, California’s Supreme Court overturned the statewide ban of same-sex marriages in the four-to-three decision, In re Marriage Cases. The court said that legislative limiting of marriage to opposite-sex couples violates the state constitutional rights of same-sex couples, and therefore could not be used to keep them from marrying. The decision also set the precedent establishing any law that discriminates based on a persons sexual orientation as “constitutionally suspect”.

Between May 15 and November 5, 2008, an estimated 18,000 same-sex couples were married in California. And wouldn’t you know that the sky didn’t fall? Supporters of Proposition 8, a measure that changed the California’s state constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, said in their campaign that schools would begin teaching children about same-sex marriage. However, there was no talk of this what so ever. In an ad against Prop 8, California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell says that schools aren’t required to teach anything about any kind of marriage. Schools had no plans on teaching about marriage, whether between a man and woman, a woman and a woman or a man and a man. The basic arguments for the ban of same-sex marriage are unfounded.

The bottom line is that Proposition 8 took away a basic freedom from a group of people. What California’s citizens were voting on was a question of morality. And in doing so, one of America’s basic morals—that of civil equality for all—was abolished.