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I was originally going to make the poll this question: "Is it wrong for gay rights activists to compare their strife to the 1960's civil rights movement?"
Obviously, African-Americans faced far worse conditions with de facto segregation in almost every aspect of life. And gay people in America today are only fighting for marriage and an end to Don't Ask Don't Tell; hardly the same. But what was the point of us studying the Civil Rights movement?
Historian Simon Schama says history should be the instrument of self-criticism. We can look back at slavery, discrimination against women, and prejudice against minority races and think how evil the people of the past must have been to treat people differently based on their race and gender. Those are the teachings of history that we accept today, but can we not imagine the world a century from now and think about how future generations will think of today's society?
Gay marriage is a civil rights issue that I am convinced the government will one day acknowledge. Marriage is so deeply ingrained in societies everywhere that granting homosexual couples only "civil unions" is at best separate but equal and at worst treating gays as second class citizens.
Compare the marriage debate to segregated baseball. Why didn't black baseball players stick to their own colored leagues? No one was stopping them from playing baseball. The government could treat white leagues and black leagues the same way, giving them both the same recreational activity tax breaks. As long as the MLB remained for whites only, blacks could play all the baseball they wanted to in their own leagues. As long as the institution of marriage remains for hetero couples only, gays can enjoy (almost) all the same rights in their civil unions. The government is indeed discriminating against gays by not letting them be married in name like hetero couples can be.
It is totally unrealistic to advocate government getting out of the business of marriage. Marriage just doesn't entail tax breaks. It encompasses the all important issues of child custody and medical decisions for unconscious partners. You can hope all you want that the Libertarian Party will one day gain power and stop issuing marriage licenses, but until then are gay couples supposed to be content not being married in society's eyes?
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