I probably have explained why I think the Gay Marriage Movement is unlike the Civil Rights Movement, but there is a citation that I haven't given which is also central in my logic here. I'll repeat it for the record.
Opposition to Civil Union and an insistence on the honor of Marriage sounds very much to me like declaring oneself white. Take the well understood paradigm of the Jim Crow South. Segregation of public accomodations was the law. You might want to go to a the place marked 'White' instead of the place marked 'Colored' for the sake of equality, but the way you achieve that is very significant. One option might be to burn down all of the colored or white establishments forcing everyone to use the same facilities. The choice of the Movement was to take down the signs one at a time. Another choice would be for James Meredith or Rosa Parks to declare themselves as White. They could have just said, let's declare everyone White.
If they had done so, I think it would have been a terrible error for a number of reasons. And so this is how the Gay Marriage Movement differes in principle from the CRM (aside from the fact that Marriage is a privilege and an honor, not a right). Activists for Gay Marriage are demaning, ostensibly but disingenuously for the sake of equal rights, that gay couples be declared Married. It would then follow that they could do the analog of eat in the White section.
Why I find this so preposterous is that I am confident that the overwhelming majority of Americans, given a case by case accounting of the actual wrongs inflicted on gays, would be amenable to judgements in their favor. With that in mind, consider the judgments made by Frank Johnson. Here are a few:
Browder v. Gayle (1956)
Orders the racial integration of the public transportation system of the city of Mongomery.
Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1961)
Invalidated the cy of Tuskeegee's plan to dilute vlack voting strength by redrawing city boundaries so as to move concentrations of black voters out of the city limits.
United States v. Alabama (1961)
Ordered that black persons be registered to vote if their application papers were equal to the performance of the least qualified white applicant accepted on the voting rolls.
Lewis v. Greyhound (1961)
Required desegration of the bus depots of the city of Montgomery
United States v. City of Mongomery (1961)
Ordered the city of Montgomery to surrender its voting registration records to the US Department of Justice.
I challenge any proponent of Gay Marriage to provide evidence of such a judicial agenda going the wrong way. Consider that there aren't very many even on the watchlist of the ACLU, and many cases are going as planned.
This is a war that cannot be won in terms of Marriage. You keep a-knockin' but you can't come in. Registered Domestic Partnerships? Sure. Disney did the benefits thing 10 years ago, so did the State of New York. But the latest spate of fights over contested marriage licenses in Massachussets and California prove that it's not easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Either way, the answer is probably no.
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