Homophobia Lives in the United States

I am bitterly disappointed with voters in California, Arizona, Florida and Arkansas today. In all of those states, voters opted to pass ballot initiatives, some of them constitutional amendments, to eliminate certain rights for gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans. In an election in which racism was shown to be on the decline, voters still proved themselves to be bigots. I am especially disappointed in California. They had marriage equality, and they have opted to tell everyone that their state constitution is a vessel for bigotry, by voting in favour of proposition 8. The most flabbergasting part of these results is how strongly black voters supported prop 8. It is incomprehensible to me that members of a group that 45 years ago was suffering the brutality of segregation could turn around today and tell another group of people that separate-but-equal is good enough (especially since "civil unions" are not as good as marriages, for all the reasons put forward in the now-annulled California Supreme Court decision).

Some day, Americans will look back on the plethora of homophobic ballot initiatives over the last eight years as a dark period in American history. Someday the veil of hateful superstition will lift, and the people of America will realize that holding someone to be less of a person and less entitled to equal benefit of law because of some factor about themselves that they have no control over is a fundamentally wrong thing to do. Someday Americans will look back on this period of ignorance and hatred, and be astonished that the people of California thought that this was an acceptable way to behave.

But until that day comes, LGBT Americans will continue to live in a country where denying their basic rights is common practice, and where embedding hatred and bigotry in a constitution is deemed an acceptable practice. The pall of racism has begun to lift, but the dusk of homophobia is settling further across the United States. For shame.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 75