He Can Marry, She Can't Vote: Another Day in Deranged America

[WilliamPitt]

Officials speak to supporters of gay marriage
during a rally at City Hall in San Francisco after
the Supreme Court's decision to strike down the
Defense of Marriage Act, on June 26, 2013.
(Photo: Jim Wilson / The New York Times)

He Can Marry, She Can't Vote: Another Day in Deranged America
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Thursday 27 June 2013

Five years ago, I donned my best suit and took my lady out to a fancy restaurant on Copley Square. I wined her and dined her, and when the moment was right, I presented her with a small diamond that had passed from my grandfather to my grandmother to my mother to me, and asked her to be my wife. A year later, we were wed in a small ceremony in a plain white church in New Hampshire.

...and nobody thought twice about it, because I am a man and she is a woman, and we were therefore spared the tyranny of religiously-justified apartheid. Our right to marry, to join our lives together in a moral and legally-binding contract was never disputed, because I am a man and she is a woman, and the hateful interpretation of an ancient, outdated text did not apply to us.

That hate is still here, and will never really go away. The same ancient text that condemns unto death same-sex unions also condemns unto death those who work on the Sabbath, those who plant different crops side by side, and those who wear clothes made from different threads, with nary a word of condemnation for the institution of slavery or the brutal subjugation of women...and as long as there are people whose personal hypocrisy moves them to cherry-pick lines from that ancient, outdated text to justify their hatred (while wearing cotton-polyester blend shirts at the office on Saturday after fiddling with the beans and carrots and potatoes and cucumbers in their garden), we will never truly be free of it.

But on Wednesday morning, two surprising rulings from a conservative-leaning Supreme Court sent the legal justifications for America's anti-gay apartheid into a death spiral from which it will not recover.

(snip)

So that was Wednesday, a bad day all around for hate, and for the apartheid that hate would enforce on a segment of the American populace that has the crazy idea they should have the same rights I do.

But there was also Tuesday, when the same Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by striking down Section 4, an action that allows any number of counties across the nation notorious for suppressing minority voting rights to slip the federal leash.

(snip)

Again, Justice Antonin Scalia is informative. In his rage against the Court's DOMA ruling, Scalia wrote, "We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation." He took this position on Wednesday, one day after voting to strike down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, another piece of democratically-adopted legislation passed in 1965 and renewed by a massive congressional majority in 2006.

One segment of the nation is lifted out of apartheid, another is shoved back down into it, and a Justice of the Supreme Court can't remember his justification for the latter a day after ruling against the former.

Just another day in deranged America.

The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/17231-he-can-marry-she-cant-vote-another-day-in-deranged-america

[WilliamPitt]

1. Up

[deminks]

2. kick

[WilliamPitt]

3. One more kick