Monday, June 01, 2009

A Legal Same-Sex Marriage: California's Version of "Honorary White"

Those of you who either remember or have studied the bad old days of apartheid in South Africa may have heard that a status sometimes awarded to those of a different race traveling to S. Africa was "Honorary White." I had heard of the term in 1982 from a friend who was from there and it made such an impression that I remember the conversation clearly. Now that I'm researching it I find the specific details a a little different according to this 1962 Time Magazine article, as it was used for Japanese who traveled there because, well, money talks - at least then it did.

What relevance does this have now? Well none I wish, but the analogy keeps occurring to me.
According to the Calif Supreme Court, my same-sex marriage is legal. My marriage is one of 18,000, which lands us all in this really strange position. We have been granted admission to a country club that has shut the door on all the other riff raff just like us. The law of the land is that sames-sex marriage is not legal - oh except for you. What does that make me? An honorary heterosexual? You've got to be kidding. While I'll take it as I very much want to be married, that's equally as ludicrous as Honorary White. This will not last and it appears the court is of that opinion too and the court has requested the legislature fix the equal protection fubar that this leaves us in.

So we will vote on this in 2010 and possibly again in 2012. The cool thing is that while I'm annoyed at how much money this past election and the future ones will cost me in donations, I did not spend my life savings on it like some completely short sighted Yes on 8 morons let their church talk them into. If they spent their life savings on this past election, then they don't have it for this one or the next one and it also means they are completely illiterate when it comes to reading the writing on the wall. They're still stuck on "But we voted on it. Aren't we done?" (As if you can vote on someone's civil rights.) Um, remember prohibition? That was a US constitutional amendment and so was the undoing of it. The California constitution is much easier to amend (look it up).

And it means they're not noticing that children don't care nearly as much as they do about who marries who, save for maybe their children that they've succeeded in brainwashing.

So we continue to live in interesting times.

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