oh your poor feelings

After months of waiting for the verdict, people across the country who believe in equality and fairness were delighted today when Judge Vaughn Walker overturned California's Proposition 8 which made marriage inequality in California the law of the land.  Prior to prop 8, for a very short time, gay couples in California were allowed to be equal citizens in terms of marriage rights, and a few thousand couples married the person they love.  Prop 8 closed that like a closet door slamming shut.

A very few states in the US allow same sex couples to marry, and a very few allow same sex couples to attain something not entirely unlike marriage, often known as a domestic partnership.  Like school segregation before Brown vs. Board of Education, gay people were, and in too many states still are, separate but not equal.

Some people who oppose marriage equality will self righteously and infuriatingly pretend that marriage is something a man and a woman do in order to then begin bearing children so that they can have a family.  They see marriage as a holy and sacred thing that is the only way in which children are brought into the world, and they insist that the only good way for children to be conceived, born and raised is through this myth that they so want to be true.

Possibly the most infuriating argument now that prop 8 has been overturned is their decrying the "activist judge" who invalidated the votes of seven million Californians who wanted to maintain the charade that all children are born into loving families with parents of opposing genders and are raised in a quaint fifties style sort of perfection that never really ever existed.

And this argument is one that angers me so much because they conveniently ignore reality.  Okay, so they consistently ignore reality.  They ignore that children are in fact now and have been being raised by gay parents, by single parents and even are adopted and raised by parents with whom they share no actual genetic heritage beyond mere humanity. 

So, back to that seven million now disenfranchised voters in California who have to deal with the idea, solely in their slow bigoted minds, that their democracy has failed them.  What these anti equality people fail to realize, or what they so easily ignore because the light burns, is that the vote wasn't seven million to zero.  The vote, according to this page at Wikipedia was more like 7,001,084 for taking away the right to marry the person you love to 6,401,482 who believe that marriage is a fundamental right that should be available to all.

Somehow the right to equality and the votes of 6.5 million people just don't happen to matter as much as fear mongering, deception and animus.  And honestly, if you just don't like gay people have the fucking balls to say so.  Quit hiding behind your Bible or your church or your platitudes.  Own your bigotry.  Quit pretending that you're going to be in any way effected.  Quit shitting on all those kids who don't have the fortune to be married into a family that involves a couple lucky enough to have found "the one" the first time around.  Quit fucking with other people's lives.  Quit forcing us to fight you over and over again.  Just fuck off!