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Actually it's just "marriage" now
Jun. 28th, 2015 11:34 amAmong the lovely things that happened on Friday: I was running around my work building looking for a vacuum cleaner to appease my team with (enacting such high-level strategy is why I make the big bucks), when I glanced up at the tech stop's giant TV screen to see "GAY MARRIAGE LEGAL IN ALL 50 STATES" and my jaw dropped open. I'd had no idea that SCOTUS was going to rule.
As celebration is already giving way to "oh, but there's so much further to go" moaning on the internet, I'd better get my thoughts down before they're utterly uncool.
The first is from this nifty page showing how gay marriage was banned in a wave across most of the 50 states, by statute and by constitutional amendment, and then legalized in an even faster wave, over the last 23 years. All of which I lived through. All of which I was pretty much an adult through. There's a certain sense of "okay, THIS piece of history I got to watch happen, and I liked it" that I don't usually feel. But maybe of more interest, I realized for the first time that banning something is an act of recognition. I was feeling pretty bad in 2003 when it was banned in 40 states and legalized nowhere, but maybe I shouldn't have. Maybe I should have realized that public discourse and even legal action is awareness-raising.
The second is a quote from an interesting 1987 speech from Justice Thurgood Marshall, which I think is a nice perspective on the question of whether interpretation of the original Constitution is the be-all and end-all:
In the words of Tool: spiral out, keep going.
As celebration is already giving way to "oh, but there's so much further to go" moaning on the internet, I'd better get my thoughts down before they're utterly uncool.
The first is from this nifty page showing how gay marriage was banned in a wave across most of the 50 states, by statute and by constitutional amendment, and then legalized in an even faster wave, over the last 23 years. All of which I lived through. All of which I was pretty much an adult through. There's a certain sense of "okay, THIS piece of history I got to watch happen, and I liked it" that I don't usually feel. But maybe of more interest, I realized for the first time that banning something is an act of recognition. I was feeling pretty bad in 2003 when it was banned in 40 states and legalized nowhere, but maybe I shouldn't have. Maybe I should have realized that public discourse and even legal action is awareness-raising.
The second is a quote from an interesting 1987 speech from Justice Thurgood Marshall, which I think is a nice perspective on the question of whether interpretation of the original Constitution is the be-all and end-all:
While the Union survived the civil war, the Constitution did not. In its place arose a new, more promising basis for justice and equality, the 14th Amendment, ensuring protection of the life, liberty, and property of all persons against deprivations without due process, and guaranteeing equal protection of the laws.
...
The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 could not have envisioned these changes. They could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendent of an African slave. "We the People" no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of "liberty," "justice," and "equality," and who strived to better them.
In the words of Tool: spiral out, keep going.
