The Colors of Our Movement (part 2)

The movement’s colors are not a rainbow; they are more nuanced and profound than black and white. Its colors are red, white, and blue—searing and forever.

Ours is not exclusively a fight for gay rights. To celebrate love between individuals who wish to wed is to be straight, gay, black, white, brown, yellow, red, male, female, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim—and everyone in between. Mission accomplished, the gay community will be just one beneficiary of our collective success.

Ours is the same fight that Martin Luther King strode for throughout the 1960s; the same fight that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom continues in 2006; the same fight that brought a Jew named Albert Einstein to Princeton seeking refuge in the 1940s; the same fight that brought Iranians to our ports in the 1980s and Russians in the 1990s; the same fight that brought Puritans to New England in 1620.

If the “huddled masses longing to be free” are welcome to join the American rabble, then shouldn’t rightfully proud U.S. citizens expect to live both unbranded and unhindered?

In 1892, the Supreme Court declared that separate could be equal (Plessy vs. Ferguson); in 1954, it acknowledged its mistake (Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education). But at the birth of the 21st century, even while our understanding of the world is broader, deeper, and more refined than our ancestors could have imagined, a supposedly enlightened nation is gripped in controversy over the definition of marriage—with a stark generation gap to boot. Even the Czech Republic has proven itself more progressive: on July 2, 2006, it joined Canada, Spain, Holland, and Belgium as just the world’s fifth country to legalization gay marriage outright.

Distinctions without differences are so often drawn among various “kinds” of weddings, as if the gender, race, origin, orientation—even the number—of loving parties involved somehow augments or diminishes the value of the commitment. Even respectful television programs like HBO’s Big Love—a series about polygamists in Utah—while entertaining and innovative, invariably diminish the hardship of living one’s chosen lifestyle underground for fear of retribution. To describe a “kind” of marriage is to box and objectify it counterproductively.
Marriage is marriage is marriage—as it should be.

Have we not yet realized that the “ghetto-ization” of any group leads not to flourishment or assimilation into the greater society, but rather, to resentment and disillusionment when fuller freedoms can be found elsewhere?

Do same-sex couples—loving, decent, law-abiding, privacy-cherishing couples—need to expatriate to have their equality acknowledged? Must they wear a “Rainbow Badge of Courage”?

Liberty should exist for them at home, if not for their American citizenship alone, then for the “inalienable” fact that “all men are created equal”—and women too. Nowhere in the incontrovertible truths of the Declaration of Independence is any notion of orientation—sexual, racial, religious, or otherwise—mentioned.

This was no accident: rare indeed were the Founding Fathers’ oversights. Plus we’ve had 217 years to grow up already.