I Like How Blogger Calls It My "Dashboard"

I've been hearing how many people have been likening the ban on gay marriage to former Jim Crow laws. I've also been hearing a lot of people say that this is not only an incorrect comparison, but a demeaning and insulting way of putting things. While I understand that gays are totally not going through what blacks had to go through in times of slavery and the pre-jfk era, that doesn't necessarily mean that you cannot make the comparison.

It might be too easy of a comparison to make along the lines of Godwin's Law, where eventually every debate in an online forum will disintegrate into Nazi analogies, but that doesn't mean that there is no relevance to present day issues. The point that people want to make when they refer to past Jim Crow laws is that there was once a time where people were disenfranchised because they were the wrong color. There were a variety of reasons why people thought that blacks shouldn't have received equal rights that spanned from the immorality of black people, to specific bible passages, and usually just plain hatred. America realized, however, that you cannot suppress a group of people just because you don't agree with them or because they don't look or act like you.

The same reasoning applies to the gay civil rights movement. Gays are being disenfranchised. They do not receive the exact same rights as any other American. The government (and the American people, unfortunately) are keeping gays down by not giving them every single right that everybody else has. Nobody is trying to detract from the black civil rights movement. Lord knows there was a lot of pain and hardship there. And although gays appear to have it pretty good (They typically do well for themselves. Apparently they're one of the wealthiest subdivisions in America, but I think that's because they try harder and they don't have lots of kids to spend money on [esp. in Alabama or Arkansas or wherever they passed that stupid adoption law]), they still hurt that they can't participate in one of the most special moments in a normal person's life.

I dont think that people who voted for the ban on gay marriage are horrible people. Well, kinda, but I bet alot of them really do think that all hell will break loose if dudes marry dudes and girls mary girls. They're just afraid. The gay community just has a lot of reaching out to do. Especially to minority groups, if the statistics are accurate. And I don't feel bad that prop 8 passed. It's lamentable, but it wasn't necessarily supposed to happen. The results from the last vote were like 70-30 in favor of the ban, and now it's pretty much 50-50. California has come a long way. There's no doubt that this shit will be over in a year or two. I guess that's still not soon enough, but it's a relatively short time compared to however long gay people have been around and have been persecuted for their lifestyle.

Did you like how my subject totally changed? I kinda forgot where I was going with this one. Whatever.