I ask this… If there should be an assassination, I would hope that five, ten, one hundred, a thousand would rise. I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door And that’s all.
I ask for the movement to continue.
Because it’s not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power… it’s about the “us’s” out there. Not only gays, but the Blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s. Without hope, the us’s give up -
I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living.
So you, and you, and you… You gotta give em’ hope… you gotta give em’ hope.
Today I watched as the New York State Senate debated live, loudly, and in color, whether a tax paying, working, loving couple has the right to marry. Regardless of my gender or orientation, or that of anyone else's, my rights as a New Yorker were up for a vote. All of ours were. Those of our friends and of our loved ones. 62 people stood up and decided for us, debating a bill that is concerned with a basic right that should never have been up for a vote in the first place.
The rights of the minority should never be subject to a vote cast by the majority.
And I'm not even a real believer in "till death do us part," but I cannot help but feel ashamed to be represented by some of the women and men who serve me as a citizen of America and a resident of New York.
Reading the results of a vote is far different from watching as politicians debate matters of their own personal moralities with disregard for the civil rights, and lack thereof, of the constituency that put them into office. I was deeply saddened each time I heard "No" as the roll was called.
Was this matter not supposed to have been voted upon back in June, before the fortieth anniversary of Stonewall, before the apparently threatening novel concept of almost-equality caused two of the state's democrats to defect and throw the senate into a frenzy, postponing the vote for six months?
Was the United States of America not an original signatory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights more than sixty years ago? The same document which reads:
Article 16: • (1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. • (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. • (3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Article 30 • Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
I wonder especially why New York of all places? Manhattan Island holds in its herstory the Suffragettes' movement of the early twentieth century. Its streets embedded with the sights and sounds of the Stonewall Riots that launched the gay liberation movement in 1969 into a greater national conciousness. Home to Greenwich, the East Village, Alphabet City. Home to artists and misfits who sought out those neighborhoods.
The state whose borders contain one of the foremost LGBTQ friendly cities in the world is also home to a chamber of senators whom, in the year 2009, listened to the words
"Marriage Equality Act Fails 24-38."
Where did our left leaning majority go? Where did the rights of the people go? If not our state senators, will we ever see Obama make good on his promise to repeal DADT and DOMA? Or are we perpetually too focused on the war on terrorism, that we should never have started fighting, and the economy that spiraled out of control while in the hands of greedy aristocratic small-minded white men who allowed capitalism to run rampant, to even blink at human rights issues?
Why in 2009 does any legislator believe that certain constituents do not deserve the same exact rights as any other person?
We are all lessened when any one of us is denied but one fundamental right. Separate is not equal.
