the future common sense

"The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next." Matthew Arnold, 1875

Less than a hundred years ago, women couldn't vote. We didn't have the ability to choose our leaders, choose who would represent us in our own government, who would look out for ours and our children's well-being. I can't imagine it; can you? To be told that my voice doesn't count because of my gender, that I'm worth less than a man... for what reason? I am no less intelligent or capable of understanding than the average male. To us here in the 21st century, this is an antiquated idea, one so foreign to us that the 80 or so odd years that separate then from now might as well be an eternity. Of course the fight for equality for women isn't over yet, but we're nearly there.

Although African American and other races of men were technically allowed to vote after 1870, it wasn't until 1965, just over forty years ago, that many of them were actually registered and voting, especially here in my beloved South. I look around at the people with whom I work and at my friends... Asians, Indians, African Americans... and I wonder about a country which refused them the right to live freely for so many years and continued to try to deny them the right to vote until just forty years ago. Having only been born nearly thirty years ago myself, I wouldn't recognize a world in which people were denied such inalienable rights. Or would I?

While I understand that the courts overturning Proposition 8 in California yesterday would have set a dangerous precedent,  I question a society that would pass a proposition like that in the first place. Have we learned nothing from our own history? You cannot deny someone an essential right like the right to love and marry whomever one chooses. Not forever, anyway.

My husband and I are not religious people. We're good, honest, hard-working, and charitable people, but we do not participate in any organized religion and did not want God mentioned in our marriage ceremony. We had the hardest time finding someone to marry us! Even a judge turned us down, saying he was "up for deacon" in his church, and it wasn't right and would send the wrong signal to marry us without God. (We finally found a friend of my dad's who used to be a minister and was still ordained who read our beautiful ceremony the way it was written, by us for us.) 

Going through that ordeal, I have a small taste of what it's like for someone to tell you "No, your way of living, as normal and healthy as you think it is, is not right according to me, and therefore I say you can't have it that way." Who was that judge to tell me my way of loving and living wasn't as good as anyone else's? And who are we as a society to tell any two people in love that they aren't as good as us, that they don't deserve the same rights?

There should be a complete separation of church and state. It's the only way to ensure that those of us not involved in organized religion, or those of us in a minority religion, are treated with the same dignity and don't have purely Christian laws thrust on us, like this Prop 8. If that means that the government sanctions civil unions and churches sanction marriages, but all participants have the same equal rights, fine by me. I'll have a "civil union" with my husband. A rose by any other name, right?

If there is an "assault" on marriage right now, it comes not from the committed homosexual couples wanting to join their lives, but from all of us-- male, female, gay, straight, who get married without considering the consequences or commitment involved. The divorce rate, at nearly fifty percent, is what's really tearing American families apart, literally. But you don't see any so-called "defenders" of the "sanctity" of marriage running around trying to put restrictions on heterosexual marriages, apparently half of which should never have happened. They're too busy doing "God's work" keeping what could be happy, fruitful, and committed marriages from happening because the pair happens to be gay.

But it doesn't matter in the end, because in the end what is progressive and outrageous today will be perfectly normal and acceptable tomorrow. It's just a waiting game. I feel for people like my boss and his partner, who want nothing more than to move their eight year relationship into a marriage, but at least they have each other. I'm trying to be patient, as patient as they have been, waiting for the rest of America to catch up with what we already know.