The time has come to stand up

Authorship of this essay is not attributable to any individual or organization, nor is it written on behalf of any individual or organization or protected by any copyright. It may be republished freely.

"Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper." -Larry Flynt

Same-sex marriage in America seems like a colony of termites as the exterminator pulls into the driveway.

While a couple of New England states have legalized same-sex marriage, and it appears safe there for the moment, we have suffered a succession of colossal failures. Now, that succession includes California, Arizona, Florida and Arkansas, the last of which has determined that we are unfit for parenthood. California, however, is the greatest tragedy of all.

There are myriad reasons why we lost in what was supposedly a safe haven for gay people. These include ineffective campaign strategies, the lack of gay people in advertisements, lack of funding, lack of outreach to minorities -- particularly African-Americans -- and so forth.

But they all boil down to one simple reality: Every single person who votes to ban same-sex marriage in any state hates us; as does every person who puts a sign in his front yard and a sticker on his car to support marriage bans; as does every person who attends a demonstration in favor of a ban; as does every person who speaks out in favor of any same-sex marriage ban; as does every person who regards the conviction that "homosexuality is immoral" as a valid political opinion.

They all hate us.

Perhaps you already knew this and everything else written here, but sometimes, disparate facts make sense only when arranged in a novel way. That’s the essence of storytelling, and this is a story of what we face every day, but what we have not collectively acknowledged.

They rarely admit they hate us to our faces or even to themselves and will invariably deny with all tenacity that they hate us. They'll just say that they want to defend marriage from being "redefined" or from the scheming of "activist judges." They'll say children "deserve" a mother and a father. They'll say that legalized same-sex marriage will inevitably lead to legalized adult-child marriage and human-animal marriage. They'll say they don't hate homosexuals -- they merely view homosexuality as immoral. They’ll say they “love the sinner, but hate the sin.”

What they really mean, however, is that they regard homosexuals as immoral people, regardless of the contents of our characters or our actions outside our bedrooms; otherwise, they would simply say the thought of gay sex was distasteful to them, but no, they specifically use the term "immoral." They really mean that they see our relationships, no matter how loving or caring or meaningful they are to us, as the very essence of iniquity and see us as the ambassadors of sin. They really mean that despite a mountain of studies showing that same-sex couples are fully capable of being loving and supporting parents, we are a danger to children. They really mean that the feelings of infatuation and love we feel for members of the same sex are comparable to pedophilia and bestiality. They really mean that they regard marriage as something that needs to be defended from us because to afford our relationships any equal legal status or any legal status whatsoever would be to acknowledge that we're anything other than inhabitants of the lowest, darkest, filthiest abyss of society.

We pretend that underneath it all, they're really well-meaning, but misled and in need of persuasion. But that's mistaken -- people who vote to amend state constitutions to ban same-sex marriage know exactly what they're doing. They're saying that we, who have done nothing to hurt them, should be permanently ostracized and deprived of equal treatment under the law.

If you're still skeptical, consider this: They have declared that our relationships are so wrong that to accord them an equal status with their relationships is the legal equivalent of banning a newspaper, outlawing a religion, denying habeas corpus or denying women the right to vote. They have declared that giving our relationships legal recognition should be unconstitutional.

They have won this battle, but they won't stop at gay marriage. Their next target will be civil unions and domestic partnership benefits. Then, they'll go after anti-discrimination laws that protect us. After that, it'll be hate-crime laws that mention sexual orientation. Next, gay teachers will wake up and find they're no longer allowed to teach school. Finally, they'll try to reinstate sodomy laws.

We can't know when this could happen or even if it will happen, but we must know that it is a distinct possibility because it has all happened before. A number of the same-sex-marriage bans already outlaw all legal recognition of same-sex couples. In 1992, Colorado voters approved a constitutional amendment banning all laws favorable to gays; the amendment only went away when the Supreme Court overturned it -- albeit with dissents by Justices Antonin Scalia, William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas. Those same justices dissented in the 2003 decision of Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned sodomy laws. In both cases, they asserted in the strongest of terms that the state has the duty to oppress us. Now, Rehnquist is dead and Sandra Day O'Connor has retired, replaced by two new right-wing named of Samuel Alito and John Roberts.

We should not indulge in empty positive thinking and kid ourselves of the self-evident inevitability that justice will prevail in the end or that those who hate us will go away or learn to love us in time. We're not in a position to sit idly and expect justice to roll our way. If we want justice, we'll have to fight for it because they don’t want us to have it. They oppose laws that protect us from discrimination because they want it to be acceptable to discriminate against us. They oppose laws that protect us from hate crimes because they want hate crimes to be committed against us. They oppose laws that protect young gays from bullying because they want us to be bullied.

That's the whole point of these amendments. It's to ensure that no matter how much acceptance we achieve, no matter how many gay characters appear on television shows, no matter how many gay celebrities come out of the closet, no matter how many families embrace their gay sons and daughters, it will be virtually impossible for us to ever achieve full equality.

This is why they spread the lie in California that legalized same-sex marriage would lead to schoolchildren being forced against their parents' wishes to learn about gay people. They don't want their children to know that we are human beings. They want us to disappear, to go back into the closet, lest being ourselves lead us to being fired from our jobs, evicted from our homes, arrested, beaten or murdered.

Even when we don’t admit they hate us, we still internalize their hate. The young among us still constitute one of the largest percentages of teenage suicides -- more than half, according to some studies. Many of us are sluts and incapable of loving ourselves or others. Many of us engage in unsafe sex. Many of us are drug addicts, chain smokers and alcoholics. That's because that's the only way for many of us to fill the emptiness that comes from rejection by our families, beatings and harassment by our schoolmates and scorn by leaders and our fellow citizens.

Their hate affects our relationships, too. Many of us missed out on dating in middle school and high school because we and any gay peers we might have had were in the closet, so we have to wait until adulthood to experience what our straight peers get to have at age 13. Not surprisingly, instead of finding everlasting love, we often find ourselves unable to distinguish between sex and love, winding up at age 25 feeling as jaded as a 40-year-old after six divorces.

And their hate is why constitutional bans on our ability to marry the people we love are so profoundly painful. It's bad enough that we are constantly invalidated by parents, peers, politicians, preachers and the media. Now, we have voting majorities invalidating us, too, telling us that even if we do get some recognition for our relationships, they'll never be completely worthy. This is gaybashing at the ballot box.

Their hate has gotten this far because they outnumber us, and they have far more allies in the political mainstream and a much better-organized and better-funded activist infrastructure than we do. They have a message that more directly appeals to people's basest fight-or-flight emotions; we make abstract and wimpy appeals for tolerance and whimper that "discrimination is wrong," they come right out and kick us where it counts, specifically naming us as the enemy of all that is good, moral and normal. They seize on every little instance of gays behaving badly -- gays arrested for crimes, low-class behavior at gay street festivals and promiscuous gay 20-somethings having anal sex without condoms -- and present it as proof that we really are as morally bereft as they say, all the while avoiding the many of us who are victims of violence engendered by the hate they spread. They offer testimonials by so-called "ex-gays" and "former homosexuals" who claim to have "left the homosexual lifestyle" through some "reparative therapy" quackery, even as it's plainly obvious to many of us that those supposedly former homosexuals are merely attempting to justify the shame and guilt they have felt all their lives and return to their closets. They are so powerful that even politicians who are supposed to be on our side express opposition to our right to marry, not out of genuine conviction, but because supporting us would alienate those who hate us and persuade them to vote for politicians not afraid to speak out against us even more forcefully.

But their hate has also gotten this far because we have let it.

We speak up when they come after us, but we never go after them. They picket our parades and our neighborhoods, but we almost never picket their churches or their offices. We let them spread fear about the false dangers of homosexuality, but we never spread fear about the real danger of their theocracy. We're willing to let them say "homosexuality is immoral" and treat their opinion as worthy of respect rather than dismissing it as prejudicial and irrational while denouncing them as bigots.

If there's anything we should feel right now, it's a tremendous sense of betrayal by our fellow citizens and extreme disappointment in this country. Consider that South Africa abandoned Apartheid in 1994, yet it has legalized same-sex marriage. Spain was ruled by fascist dictator Francisco Franco until less than 40 years ago, yet it too has legalized same-sex marriage. Still, in what is supposedly the freest nation on earth, we suffer one indignity after another, foisted upon us by people who mean to deliberately exclude us.

We have asked for nothing more than to be treated with dignity, and all that we have received in return is what has often been called a "backlash." But a backlash against what? What did we do to them to provoke them? What do we do that makes them hate us so much? What makes them so militant against us, inspiring them to spend millions of dollars and hours to make our lives as miserable as possible, even as the country is on the brink of recession and the world faces problems ranging from disease to poverty?

Our crime is asserting that we exist. As punishment, we face referendums not on our right to marry, but on our right to continue existing.

We need to know that they threaten the existence of all of us: gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered of every race and ethnicity, of every age, of every degree of physical or mental ability, of every religion and non-religion, of every geographic location, of every economic and social class, of every political persuasion, whether out or closeted, whether single or partnered, whether HIV-positive or negative, whether we're masculine or effeminate, whether we're monogamous or have multiple partners. We are all in this together, and we have to be willing to love ourselves and love each other for the wonderful, beautiful people we are, no matter our differences.

Reports have already surfaced that African-American gays have had "nigger!" shouted at them because 70 percent of black voters in California helped to vote away our rights. But this is exactly what our oppressors want: for us to turn on each other -- not to mention attacking some of the most vulnerable among us, who face the twin bigotries of homophobia and racism -- instead of unleashing our wrath upon our real enemies.

We may not have the advantage of shared skin color, societal background or ancestry, but we are people who have too many life experiences in common for our superficial differences to divide us. No matter how adamantly they insist that we chose to be this way or that we have a curable disease or that daring to express our feelings makes us immoral, we know they are wrong.

We can no longer afford to stay in our closets. We can no longer afford to be ashamed of ourselves or our feelings. We can no longer afford to let them get away with persecuting and oppressing us.

The time has come to stand up.