Abracadabra

I've been spending an hour or two reading a debate about gay marriage, and for once I am struck by something which often gets overlooked. Conservatives frequently talk about "activist judges" reinterpreting the constitution and "magically finding" constitutional rights that never existed before, such as the right to sexual privacy found in Lawrence v. Texas. Or, as the conservatives themselves put it, "a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy".

What gets missed, I believe, is that these rights have always existed. The magic lies not in finding them, but in setting aside older beliefs that have kept them from being recognized or acknowledged. When one removes from consideration the kind of thinking that labels homosexual lovemaking equivalent to bestiality, it frees you to see that despite such preconceptions there have always been legal protections which should have been recognized for homosexual unions.

This is the same as the law initially recognizing that it provided protection against black americans being murdered. It always had such protections, no new laws needed to be written that specifically made it illegal to murder black americans after slavery was repealed. What needed to happen was for old preconceptions to be let go of. Once the hatred was released, and people of african descent were recognized as human, their right to life was clearly present in our laws. That is the nature of the magic involved in discovering new rights, and it is indeed magical in my opinion. But true magic, not the stage magic implied by the comments of the conservative.

That is where homosexuality stands now.... at the doorway to being considered human, in a very real way. Moving past the intolerance and hatred that has caused people to label our unions equivalent to bestiality. With this veil of anger and fear removed, it is unsurprising that with unclouded eyes our courts are beginning to find the rights that have always existed for us in our laws, and grant us the equal protections that we have so long been denied. I firmly believe that this is only the beginning, and that it is leading toward an age where homosexual unions are viewed as equal to the unions of heterosexuals. And perhaps further. I look forward to seeing where our new recognition of inherent human rights will take us, and I hope that the journey will not be cut short prematurely by further fear and hatred.