A week has passed since the election, but the energy and movement for change is surging.
Thanks to the out-of-state Focus On The Family hate mongers and the Mormon Church fundraising my Tuesday night election elation got a buzz kill.
It was clear at 6:30 p.m. -- barring any of the typical GOP voting tricks of the past -- that Obama would win. As I drove home from work and heard on National Public Radio that Ohio had gone blue I knew it. There’s no way Obama could lose after that. Grandpa McSame and Caribou Barbie would be sent packing and voters had rejected their McCarthyite tactics, fear mongering, old-school trickle down b.s. Off to the fossil museum, both of you! My “husband” and I were glued to our TV until 8 p.m. when the cable news freak show finally called it for Obama.
To have it an unambiguous landslide was so very sweet after eight years of Republican misrule and disasters. No more divisive tactics splitting the country apart. No more Florida squeakers, electoral college win despite popular loss, Supreme Court interventions or Ohio election shenanigans. Finally, we’ll have a smart president again -- someone who’s curious about the world and works hardest for the poor, working folks and not for the corporate fat cats and mouth-breathing theocrats. Finally, finally an end to the pointless, unnecessary, bank-breaking, war-of-choice in Iraq is in sight. Goodbye Gitmo!
Elation doesn’t begin to describe the feeling in the air as I took Oscar for his evening walk and detoured down to the main boulevard near our house. Cars were honking, people were screaming, the folks at the No on 8 office poured into the street waving signs. A gentleman came out of their office and offered me a glass of celebratory champagne. I thanked him but asked if he’d heard anything about Proposition 8. He said they hadn’t received any results. I kept walking, with a sense of doom. After a night of hitting the refresh button on my browser it became clear that a slight majority of Californians had voted to send me back to being a second-class citizen. Only five short months of equality; they were sweet, wonderful months and I even saw my little brother get married in the grand and beautiful rotunda of San Francisco City Hall.
The media immediately began analyzing the exit polls to tell us it was church-going black folks and Hispanics who voted so overwhelmingly for Prop H(8). Could this be true? I guess small numbers make a big difference when the vote is that close. I don’t blame them for taking away my civil rights as much as I blame the bankrollers of this travesty. Catholics and Mormons were ordered by their religious leaders to donate money to this effort. It’s them I blame above all. And the hate-radio empire of Focus On The Family (Can’t they focus on their own damned families instead of destroying ours?).
The gay community has taken to the streets every night since then. My Thursday night commute home down Sunset Blvd. came to an abrupt halt as 300 pro-marriage protesters occupied a main intersection, waving signs and shouting. I love it. Not since my younger days in San Francisco have I seen this much anger and energy in the community. I remember when Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner ruled with the 5-4 majority in Bowers vs. Hardwick to say it’s constitutional for states to outlaw being gay and then had the nerve to show up in San Francisco for a speaking engagement. (“There’s a name for women like her, but it’s not used in polite society...outside of a kennel.”) Thousands of us took to the streets and surrounded her fancy hotel near Union Square. That was the late 1980s, but about 15 years later the same woman voted with the 5-4 majority to overturn that decision with Lawrence vs. Texas. This will take time, people, but we will be fully equal citizens one day.
I have to explain to many of my friends Loving v. Virginia and the meaning of Loving Day. It’s important to know history and the social struggles that came before us. California overturned its law against interracial marriage in 1948. But it wasn’t until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court finally overturned these laws for the entire country. That’s 19 years to make the ultimate progress. We’re just in the beginning stages of our own civil rights struggle. And other important battles will be imposed on us by the religious freaks between now and then. They’re already trying it all over the country with their tax-free dollars. Let’s start by passing an inclusive ENDA. That’s something that’s possible and politics is always about the art of the possible.
With a new, young, intelligent president we’ll now get judges appointed to the Supreme Court who are not arrogant theocrats like Alito, Roberts and Scalia or idiots like Clarence Thomas.
Obama could turn out to be a Clinton (who signed DOMA and broke his promise to overturn the ban on gays in the military). But I read this morning that he’s consulted several times in May and June of 2007 with Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Bishop in the Episcopal church, about what it’s like to be a breakthrough leader. Link here.
Just remember to keep fighting and know that each little decision you make and each little action you take will add up in the end.
