Vote No on Ballot Question #1

Tomorrow, Virginia voters get an opportunity to put down a measure that would add a ban on gay marriage to the Commonwealth’s Constitution. I hope like hell the electorate takes it. The amendment as written is a horrible piece of legislation, ensconcing state-sponsored bigotry into our Constitution while potentially outlawing all sorts of legal contracts between unmarried citizens. This really is an awful, mean-spirited attempt to devalue the rights of a narrow group of citizens based on sexual preference and smacks of some of the distasteful and racist anti-miscengation laws of the Jim Crow South (see Loving v. Virginia) that belatedly, yet thankfully, were struck down by the Supreme Court.

Indeed, in the Jim Crow South, the first step to ending such long held but misguided attitudes towards race was to remove the laws that enabled states to legally subjugate, segregate, disenfranchise, or otherwise restrict a citizen’s rights based on skin color. By integrating schools, outlawing poll taxes, and broadly guaranteeing civil rights for everyone, society began to stigmatize racism as anti-social and unacceptable. Tomorrow, we get a rare and fleeting chance to ensure that all citizens of the Commonwealth stand equally before the law, to dispel the notion of social justice is some quaint relic from a bygone era, and to take a stand for what is decent and right in a time when we are being asked to sacrifice decency and righteousness for some false sense of security.

So please, if you are planning to vote tomorrow, reject Question #1 and repudiate the narrow-mind idea that some citizens, for reasons arbitrary and ill-conceived, are deserving of second class citizenship. Let us reaffirm the wisdom and high minded ideals put forth by Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father and patron saint of Virginia:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.