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In reply to the discussion: President Obama Affirms His Support for Same Sex Marriage [View all]Classy_Liberal
(1 post)I love this article, because it shows that even though we're making progress, the society is still so intolerant:
http://fervidus.wordpress.com/
Here's an excerpt I like:
"DOMA [Defense of Marriage Act] indirectly, but precisely, targets gays and lesbians just as Jim Crow literacy test laws indirectly but precisely targeted black people to prevent them from voting: The 15th Amendment extended the suffrage to citizens regardless of race, so that black men (not women, of course) could vote. To circumvent that, Southern states required voters to pass a literacy test. If a voter couldnt read, then he couldnt vote. Prior to emancipation, teaching slaves to read was a high crime, punishable by death. Consequently, newly-freed slaves were unlikely literate, thereby unable to pass the literacy test, and therefore effectively disenfranchised despite the 15th Amendment. That situation didnt change until passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Modern America fancies itself too enlightened to enact a law that explicitly prohibits gays and lesbians from marrying. But, using the same oblique approach as the literacy test, by defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman, DOMAs limitation of liberty only applies to one group, gays and lesbians.
Preventing people from marrying due to their sex or sexual orientation is equal to doing so because of their race. DOMA is essentially identical to laws prohibiting interracial marriage, only the immutable characteristic on which the bar is based is different. Most Americans are horrified at the notion that two people could not marry merely because their skin color didnt match. But because gays and lesbians are still considered deviant, not just different, it remains sensible to some that marriage should be impossible not if their skin colors dont match but if their sex chromosomes do."