Prop 8: Enshrining Bigotry in the Cali Constitution
I’m sure that if you’ve been awake for the last couple of months, you’ve heard about California Proposition 8. It is a measure seeking to overturn same-sex marriage by putting anti-gay marriage wording into the state constitution.
Until 1948, 48 states had anti-miscegenation laws on the books. I wonder if, that year, when the California Supreme Court ruled in Perez v. Sharp that the state’s anti-miscegenation statute was unconstitutional, if just as many people were upset about it? There had been several pushes to put anti-miscegenation wording into the US Constitution, but they all failed. What upright people among us would lament Perez v. Sharp or Loving v. Virginia today? Indeed there are still bigots out there who would deny people of two different racial backgrounds the right to marry, and I guarantee that these same horrible people would further deny two people of the same gender the right to marry. The parallels are so abundant that it makes me ill.
Furthermore, if people want to look to the Bible for their views on marriage, I think they ought to open up to Numbers 25 to get a good dose of how their god wants his followers to treat people in mixed marriages.
After the people ‘commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab,’ Moses has them all killed. Then God tells Moses to hang their dead bodies up in front of him; God says that this will satisfy him. When one of the Israelite men brings home a foreign woman, ‘Phinehas (Aaron’s grandson) sees them and throws a spear “through the man .. and the woman through her belly.’ This act pleases God so much that ‘the plague was stayed from the children of Israel.’ But not before 24,000 had died. Numbers 25:1-9