“As California goes…”

“…so goes the rest of the nation. It's inevitable. This door's wide open now. It's going to happen, whether you like it or not.”

So said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on Thursday, May 14, 2008 after the California Supreme Court ruled against a ban on same-sex marriage. Spectators cheered. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was supportive.

Opponents are fuming. How could a Catholic mayor and a Republican governor allow this affront to the institution of marriage to occur? They are crying inappropriate judicial activism (as if there were any other kind). I call it progress too long in coming.

How ironic is it that gay marriage would be legal in states under Republican governorships (Schwarzenegger in California, Mitt Romney in Massachusetts)? Log cabin Republicans notwithstanding, members of the Republican Party are stereotypically seen as bigots; they hate gays (except hot lesbians), immigrants, minorities, and the poor. Bambi’s mother was probably shot by a gun-loving Republican hunter. (I kid; the hunter was a Libertarian.)

But I digress. The court’s ruling is an important step in the long march toward true equality. The court did exactly what I did when defending gay marriage to a fellow student in my Civil Rights history class: they used the precedent of a 1948 ruling that struck down a ban on interracial marriage.

Although it’s a bit touchy to compare anti-miscegenation laws to bans on same-sex marriage, both the ban on interracial marriage and the ban on gay marriage have interesting parallels in the proponents for those bans. They said that miscegenation and homosexuality were unnatural and sacrilegious. Blacks and homosexuals have both been considered less than human, and violence has been perpetrated against both groups, killing innocents. And while homosexuals have had an advantage in being able to hide their orientation (a “luxury” Blacks don’t have), the cost of being discovered can be a terrible price to pay, depending on where one lives.

I don’t expect bigots to read this blog, but in case they do, listen up. The time is approaching when your stupidity will be exposed as such. Homophobia will be perceived as something quaint and outdated, like burning witches, black and white TV, or paying for long distance calls. You will go the way of the dinosaur, the dodo, and Laserdiscs. And when you become artifacts relegated to dusty halls of antiquity, you will be observed not with awe or interest, but with the disdain that comes with looking at how shamefully humanity once behaved. It's inevitable. It's going to happen, whether you like it or not. In order for you to survive, you must adapt and evolve.

What am I saying? You probably don’t believe in evolution either.