By Tim Chai
<[email protected]>

Nov. 11 will forever be remembered as a new era in American history: an age of equality, an age of hope and an age of unlimited possibilities.

And an age of continued discrimination and hate.

This past Election Day, Americans seemed to finally have put race behind them when they elected Barack Obama for the virtue and ability of the man irrespective to the color of his skin. But, waking up the next morning, my heart broke when I heard that Proposition 8, which redefines marriage as the union of man and woman in the state of California, passed by the narrowest of margins.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the passage of Proposition 8 is the fact that one minority group voted against another. According to exit polls, Prop 8 was largely helped by a high minority turnout driven by the excitement for Obama’s candidacy; these polls reported that 70 percent of African-Americans and more than half of Latino voters backed the proposition to take a right from a fellow minority. I’m angered with all these liberal individuals—a minority which has endured more than a century of discrimination and segregation—who mobilized behind Obama for “change,” but didn’t turn to check on their fellow brothers and sisters, some of the biggest fundraisers, campaign organizers and supporters of the president-elect, from being left behind. Proposition 8 is in many ways similar to Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act, which outlawed interracial marriages; the Supreme Court would eventually rule the law unconstitutional, calling marriage a “basic civil right of man.”

The controversy of Prop 8 rests on the definition of marriage and who has the right to define it. One group of proponents of the bill argued that the California Supreme Court did not have the right to rule the ban on same-sex marriages unconstitutional earlier this year. They said that Prop 8, rather, would ensure that the issue be democratically decided upon. But our founding fathers didn’t build this nation on a system of complete democracy, fearing the excess of the masses against minority groups. Instead, they created an electoral system and different branches of government to uphold the ideals of the constitution. This first camp ignores the historical dangers of allowing the majority to vote on a minority’s civil rights. It’s amazing how easily they can forget the masses’ support of discrimination and segregation just decades earlier.

The second major group supporting the proposition consist of religious conservatives (the Mormon Church alone raised $22 million for Proposition 8); they claim that allowing same-sex couples to marry ruins the sanctity of marriage. While private institutions like churches have the right to these ideas and can make arbitrary rules about which marriages they sanction, it is important to note that marriage has moved from a religious practice to a secular one. Indeed, no matter what philosophy you follow or what religion you practice—or choose not to for that matter—marriage is a universal practice.

Today, secular government has changed marriage into a very much legal practice. Couples must register for marriage licenses at City Hall, and many individuals meet with lawyers and financial planners to hammer out the technical aspects of the union. While most states offer civil unions to same-sex couples, this practice does not provide the same legal protections and affords couples at least a thousand fewer privileges. If the government is going to be involved in marriages (tax-breaks anyone?), it must be held to the same standard of equality that every other aspect of government is put under and be readily available to everyone. After all, don’t we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “(An) injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Proposition 8’s prejudice is a threat to the entire American legal system and its ideas of equality and hope. God knows we don’t want that again.