I was slamming a troll diary on this topic a few moments ago, something I shouldn't do, but it's therapy for me, and it led me to write this diary.
For the record, I am a straight man living in a heavily Republican county who unequivocally supports full and equal marriage rights for my gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered brothers and sisters. I do so without reservation, and in the knowledge that, just as November 4th was a long awaited triumph against racism in this country, so too, someday, will we achieve equality for all Americans, just as the Constitution has always promised.
Oh, I'm sure the troll is just as committed as to preventing that equality. But I'm confident, and not the least bit worried that history will prove me right, just as it has repeatedly during my lifetime.
In 1831, there was a thin, bespectacled little man in Boston, Massachusetts who had made up his mind that slavery was a moral abomination. He dedicated his life to making abolition a reality. William Lloyd Garrison, started his own abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, and worked nonstop for the next 34 years to make his dream a reality.
His opening lines in the first issue of that newspaper left little doubt as to his commitment:
"I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I shall be heard!"
We need, and I believe we have, such commitment to the idea of equal marriage rights in this country.
In the 1950's and 60's, when African-Americans and civil rights activists throughout the country were on the front lines of the desegregation and voting rights battles, ballot issues on that topic, denying equality for African-Americans just as Prop 8 now denies rights to gays would probably have passed as well, and many did, actually. Racism was popular in the 1950's South. Today, the vast majority of Americans everywhere would look at such racist legislation as nothing but bigoted and wrong.
So I have a message for that troll and all others who oppose justice and equality for Gay America: we opponents of Prop 8 aren't defeated, we're emboldened. We are strengthened, we are committed, and we are more numerous by the day. We'll never quit. In 30 years, Americans will look back at your hatred of gays the way we look back at those 1950's segregationists now - as a bunch of discriminating, reactionary idiots who wouldn't get out of the way of justice and equality until the busloads of activists literally ran them over.
And I hope to be driving that Bus of Inevitable Progress in this case, on this issue, when equality's victory over intolerance happens to you as well.