All of the major candidates for President, even before Hillary was out of the running, believed that "gay marriage" as a term, should not exist, to protect the sanctity of the marriage of a man and woman. Basically, what they're saying, is that they would support a law that limits the term "marriage" to the union of a man and a woman. So they support not just the idea, but the legal enforcement of the idea, of separate but equal. And two of those people are minorities.
I can't say a WHOLE lot about the "responsibility of the minority" to not forget what their people have gone through - I'm a white male. Nor do I suggest that there is a collective "black people," or a collective "women." We all have different, often inexplicable characteristics or tendencies that baffle those who have already come to accept us for our differences. Take the Log Cabin Republicans. Those guys are nuts.
My problem with anything claiming to "protect the sanctity of marriage," especially a law, is that it is misuse of the law as a system. The law exists to protect people. It has never existed explicitly to limit the rights of others. Certainly, it has been abused to those ends, but that is not the prescribed purpose of law. We have a law against murder to prevent lives from being taken. We have a law against theft to protect the personal economy of citizens. How am I and my future wife going to be safer - and from what? - because two lesbians call their marriage a "union?"
Why are homosexuals left to the Gay fountain, which looks exactly like the Straight fountain, with the exception of the sign above it that so strikingly reads "GAY?" We're both drinking the same water. I guess they just need to be reminded of their place. Over there.
When law takes charge of how I live my leave peacably, it infringes upon my civil rights. Blacks were prevented from voting by Jim Crow. They had to sit at the back of the SAME bus - it wasn't a different bus, because they were people, too - as white folk. The illusion of equality by the use of the same label for different circumstances, or a different label for the same circumstances, is a lateral hierarchy. They use the term "civil union," defined by having the same rights as any straight "married" couple, to separate the gays from the straights. When you say "But you'll have the same rights," you're lying. They no longer have the right to call their relationship a marriage. They don't have the right to feel like they belong, after a lifetime of fighting to be accepted for who they are. It seems like a simple word on a piece of paper or a sign to some, but so was the word "Colored" at one point in history.
Please stop copping out by saying that "states have their right to choose." They also had the right to choose whether or not to adopt or abolish slavery. Jim Crow laws were not stopped federally for the same reason - States' rights. The rights of the people will ALWAYS trump those of the state. Infringing upon them - even refusing to stop said infringement, or leave it up to someone else - is against everything we have worked to turn this country in to.
Without the 19th amendment, Hillary wouldn't have stood a chance. Without the 13th, neither would Obama. And it was 103 years, and not until MLK was assassinated, before that amendment really started to take effect. Should we have to wait for something drastic? Does a new leader who daringly defies those self-appointed liberal groundbreakers have to show their head and risk being taken down for simply opposing a single policy of those who symbolize a "New Hope" for America? It shouldn't have to happen. We've seen enough historically to allow equality to blossom. Yet ignorance, politics and personal preference are, yet again, standing in the way of personal freedom. Just not in the way of those who have had the way paved for them.
Maybe you are trying not to offend your constituency, but that's a poor excuse. You're offending the rest of your constituency - those who believe in the truth of The Bill of Rights - by perpetuating intolerance.
