When the news broke that we had won the Proposition 8 Court Case in Federal Court for a moment it seemed almost unbelievable. Surely, at long last, the Courts of the United States not only bestowed equality upon the LGBT community but did so with such grace and dignity. Yesterday was a major step, a historic one, for the LGBT community. Yes, we still have far to go and there are many appeals and rulings ahead. However, to understand the full scope of this victory we need to acknowledge how far we have traveled over the last decades.
I will never forget, while in college, my first awareness with the role that the courts would play in my life as a gay man. In the paper was just a minor article that most readers would miss entirely. Being in the closet it might as well have been the front page headline for the impact that it had on so many lives. A judge faced four young men from good families who had taken a baseball bat and beaten to death a gay man coming out of the bar. The judge at the sentencing noted their 'good families' and gave them all probation. In meting out the sentence, this judge praised the young men for performing 'a community service' in dealing directly with such perversion. That article and that injustice never left my mind. Oh, how I wish I could remember the victim's name and honor him here today.
Then I reflect on the hundreds of millions of dollars....yes, hundreds of millions ...that the LGBT community has had to raise over the last decades since the late 1970's fighting ballot measures that enforced our status as second class Americans. In city after city and state after state, this noble and proud community was forced to fight over and over again for our Constitutional rights. In a sense, it became a form of societal terrorism when LGBT Americans saw their neighbors and fellow citizens strip us of the protection of the Constitution. The pain of those election nights was horrific and the campaigns against us were barbaric. Many of the issues of self-hatred among our young and the high suicide rate came from the hateful and bitter rhetoric in those campaigns directed to this community.
Then in 1986, while we were fighting to stay alive and save our friends, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Bowers v. Harwick a decision by a 5 to 4 vote that made the sodomy laws legal. Reinforcing to the nation that the way we made love was against the law and it was entirely correct, if the government chose, to put us in jail. Stunned doesn't even begin to describe our reaction that day over 25 years ago. The decision was a like a knife to our guts.
Of course we must never forget the thousands who fought by our side and were taken too soon by HIV/AIDS and never lived to see this day. The names of two brilliant legal minds come to the fore - Tom Stoddard and Dan Bradley.
Yesterday I was jubilant with our victory in the Federal Court. Our second major court victory on Proposition 8 was given to us and which was led by the incredibly talented team at the American Foundation for Equal Rights and without a doubt the two best lawyers in America, David Bois and Ted Olson. This organization and our lawyers' names should be remembered forever by our community.
So, from the days of a judge praising our deaths, I have reached a point when I can listen to the news and read the reports and hear Federal Judge Stephen Reinhardt say:
“Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect in California, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for laws of this sort...'
How sweet it is!
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