By Amanda Epstein and Miriam Kolker
History will look back on 2008 as the year America finally addressed its ugly racial divisions and elected the first black president, but also as the year the civil rights struggle for Florida’s gay and lesbian community was set back a generation.
The passage of Amendment 2 with 62% of the vote is a glaring example of intolerance in an otherwise uplifting election. The so called ban on gay marriage, which threatens the rights of heterosexuals and homosexuals alike, will prove to be an embarrassment to future generations.
The amendment, which was intended to discriminate against gays, has the effect of nullifying the domestic partnerships, civil unions, and common law marriages of even heterosexual couples, denying them the same rights and privileges now reserved for a “legal union.” Elderly heterosexual couples that never bothered to get married may now have to do so in order to preserve inheritance and visitation rights, but this option is not available to gays and lesbians, America’s last group of second-class citizens.
Even though this amendment is now part of the Florida constitution, it should be overturned on the grounds that it violates the United States Constitution.
The fourteenth amendment clearly states that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” The right to marry the love of one’s life is something Americans have long since gotten used to.
This idea was put to the test before, forty years ago, in the case of Loving v. Virginia, when the Supreme Court overturned a state law that prevented blacks and whites from marrying.
It might be hard to believe in 2008, but when Barack Obama was born, his black father and white mother could have been arrested in nearly half of the American states, simply for being married to one another. Today, teenagers look back on these injustices with a mixture of disbelief and shame.
So if it was wrong to keep Obama’s parents from marrying in 1961, how can it be right to prevent gay couples from marrying in 2008?
Proponents of the ban will point to religion or biology to come up with an answer: Either gay marriage is immoral, they say, or else it is unnatural. But don’t they see that the exact same arguments were used in the 1960s to prevent interracial marriage? “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” wrote one Virginia judge 40 years ago. “The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
In reality, the fact that teenagers today laugh and cringe at the absurdity of these bigoted arguments shows what their own children and grandchildren will think of Amendment 2.
Perhaps the only silver lining of the vote was that while elderly voters voted 66% in favor of gay discrimination, only 52% of 18-24 year olds voted the same way. In fact, if only people under 40 had voted, the amendment would have clearly failed. The truth is that the older voters won’t be here forever, and in another decade two, the same generation that elected the first black President will finally accept marriage equality for all.
