The Daily Background

This past week, South Carolina’s state legislature (the one that still has the Confederate flag flying outside their building) permanently wrote discrimination into their state constitution by banning equal rights for gay Americans. No offense, South Carolina, but this move only strengthens your kind of shitty record on equal rights, civil rights and human rights.

Republican operatives came up with the idea to ban gay marriage last year and got a ban on the November ballot as a measure voters could vote on. It was a cynical ploy to try and attract more conservatives to the polling booth, similar to what happened in 2004. It’s actually surprising that Republicans would stoop to such a trick in South Carolina during midterm elections because it’s such a reliably Republican state.

Either way, it’s absolutely disgusting and blatantly unconstitutional. Republicans and more-moral-than-thou types say that discrimination like this isn’t a matter of equality since they claim gay and lesbian Americans still have equal rights. Men have the equal right to marry women, and women have the equal right to marry men.

This is of course an idiotic way of thinking, and taken to its logical extreme, one could argue that the only way this way of applying equal rights would be for women to have the same right that men have– to marry women. For some reason, I don’t think these anti-equality bigots have thought their argument through that far though.

Pro-equality activists point out that it’s not a matter of everyone having the right to marry a specific type of person, instead it’s a matter of stopping the government from deciding and dictating whose love is immoral and whose love is okay. There are some half-way Libertarian types who say that if South Carolina wants to ban gay marriage, they should be allowed to do so, because people who want equal rights can just move elsewhere.

This is another idiotic argument. The constitution, a more perfect document than the men who wrote it, promises all Americans the pursuit of happiness. Not the pursuit of happiness in certain places under certain circumstances and only if you don’t happen to live in a state with a bunch of bigots who think that your love is a threat to theirs. Hopefully the day is not so far off when when this South Carolina amendment and several others across the country will be overridden by a federal ban on discriminating over the basis of sexual orientation.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog