With Prop 8 in California, Revisiting Morality vs. Legality

The more things change, the more they stay the same; or so the saying goes. In this, the third millennium, some old ideas are still rearing their ugly heads in this the most progressive of all national governments.

In California, 2008 ballot measures are old and new again. Measures 1335 Abortion Ban and 1341 Legalization of Marijuana both failed to qualify for the General Election. However, a proposition to alter the equal rights held by all US Citizens under the 14^th Amendment of the US Constitution is on the November 4, 2008, General Election Ballot, according to the California Secretary of State website, http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_j.htm.

For anyone who has been living in a cave for the last year, Initiative Proposition 8 Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry. In one local town, volunteer campaigners are in front of large chain stores like Target and KMart, that arguably serve "average middle American." In a typical middle to upper middle class White Anglo Saxon Protestant area, less than 20 minutes from one of the most diverse cities in the world (Los Angeles), there have been PTA Presidents, soccer moms and church ministers jumping up and down at the corner of every intersection with signs for months. Their message is clear: YES on 8. Surely, there was as much debate, anger and mudslinging back in 1967, one year before I was born, when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional.

According to a legal source website www.Findlaw.com, the wording of that case says the State was seeking "statutory scheme to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications held to violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment." Is it not the same issue? If it were in production today, would we be able to substitute two gays or lesbians in place of Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton in the 1967 movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"

Being an African-American woman, married to a man outside of my race, I have to wonder if one day I might end up in jail for unwittingly breaking the law in this country. As we continue to backslide into old paradigms and backward thinking, history seems to be caught in a never-ending loop of crazy making.

My husband asked me to marry him 20 years ago, and we still get incredulous stares. And now, my children face growing up in a time when every premise this country was built on is being rethought. Today's issue is the right to marry. What's next? Will it one day be illegal for them to drink from a public water fountain, to ride in the front of the bus, to speak without being spoken to and pick a different race within which to marry?

As a collection of nationals who consider ourselves to be more evolved and even "a cut above" most any other country in the world, what will most Americans do come November 4? Will they vote for the equal rights of all US citizens to choose to marry whomever they please or slip back into the dogma of judgment and denial of basic human rights? More than any other time, there is anticipation in the air at to what kind of America we will wake up to come November 5.