Wednesday morning I couldn’t help it, I watched some more footage, notably an interview with an African-American woman in Grant Park the night before, saying that for the first time in her life she wanted to fly an American flag. She said she wanted to be clear, that she hadn’t harbored ill feelings before, but now she was just so proud.

By early Wednesday afternoon, it was clear that voters in California had supported a constitutional amendment denying marriage rights to its gay and lesbian citizens – rights the state supreme court had deemed were theirs six months prior.

Voters in Arizona and Florida also denied their citizens equal marriage rights, and Arkansas approved a ban on adoption of children by non-married couples, which was targeted at gay couples, but therein hurts multiple populations including children and unwed straight couples. Arkansas already has three times as many children who need homes as people willing to adopt or foster them. I wonder if those children are waving an American flag today.


View larger version. Cartoon by Mikhaela B. Reid.

From the highs of Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, I suddenly felt as badly as I did when George Bush stole the last two presidential elections. I certainly wasn’t feeling like I wanted to hang an American flag. I certainly wasn’t feeling included in the party. In fact not only was I not feeling included, I suddenly realized I was deliberately and overtly excluded. Kicked in the stomach.

Another California ballot initiative that passed Tuesday night gave greater rights to chickens. I love chickens, and I don’t begrudge them their newfound freedoms. But it’s a bit of a trip to realize that in the same voting booth, people pulled levers for the rights of chickens, and against the rights of you.

It’s also a weird trip to learn that over 70% of blacks voted against your rights. The people for whom I was so happy the night before, for whose victory I was cheering. The people who know more than anyone about discrimination and living as second class citizens and worse, would not have any empathy for a different group of people enduring similar discrimination. It’s within living memory that blacks did not have marriage freedom!

I know that there are racist gays. I once worked for one, and could not understand it, for the same reason: how do you not have empathy for someone going through struggles so similar to yours? But while I have no evidence to back up this claim, I do not believe that 70%+ of gays would vote for the repeal of rights for African-Americans.

Is it that it lifts us up to believe that others are below us? And gays are one of the few groups lower in image than blacks? Does it make them feel fuller, more powerful, to have a ‘class’ beneath them? Racism has certainly been exploited by the powerful to keep anger and fear directed at blacks instead of its rightful target of corporations and the ruling class that steal the resources of the country from the people. Are gays the new blacks now that racism has lost its power?

Some say it is religion, although of course pointing to the very few bible passages that might be about homosexuality is as logical as keeping women indoors when they are menstruating, and other ridiculous propositions that are in the bible.

But here is where I need some education, because I just don’t get it: Whites kept blacks as slaves. Blacks adopted the religion of those who enslaved them. Why?? I guess I can understand that they were stripped of their culture and separated from their families, but it’s happened even on the continent of Africa, with non-enslaved people. Do you just buy into the religion of those with power and riches, because, hey, they must be doing something right? I just still don’t understand how or why African-Americans swallowed whole the religion of their captors and oppressors.

Speaking of religion: Mormons. That’s one belief system I’m not even going to attempt to understand. But they are the ones who contributed huge amounts to dismantle same-sex marriage rights. They’re polygamists! (Or, I should say, still would be if the federal government hadn’t stepped in and criminalized it.) The guys who want 12 wives each, “defending marriage between one man and one woman.” Sour grapes? It becomes more and more absurd.

Here’s a question: If the right wing were really interested in “defending marriage”, why aren’t they trying to outlaw divorce? Is there a single reported incident of a gay coupling that has caused a heterosexual divorce? Outlaw divorce and criminalize unwed co-habitation, and you will have saved marriage, knuckleheads! You are trying to protect an institution from the very people who buy into that institution. You should be focused on those who don’t buy in or those who opt out – they are the ones undermining the institution, are they not?

And if the opponents of equal marriage rights are afraid of the decline of civilization as we know it once the gays start getting married, why haven’t we witnessed anarchy and the destruction of the social fabric in Canada? (Which, as Sarah Palin would say, “we can see from our borders.”) Or Massachusetts, or Holland, or Spain, etc. etc.

Look, I know logic isn’t the way to a homophobe’s – or racist’s - heart or brain. I know it all comes down to fear of the other. If it’s different, I don’t like it, it scares me, I want to get rid of it.

Tragic is a word much more apt to describe November 4, 2008 than September 11, 2001. September 11 was a horrific attack in which many paid dearly. But a tragedy, in the Greek sense, involves the downfall of a great person that could have been prevented were it not for the tragic flaw of the hero. The tragedy of November 4 is that Americans could not overcome an irrational fear, and attacked other Americans, attacked their own, by denying them, as the Supreme Court says, “one of the civil rights of man.”

And how did it become possible that minority rights are decided by majority vote? Isn’t that inherently contradictory? What if Virginia mixed-race marriage had been put to the voters of that state? Don’t we live under a constitution that promises equal rights for all, and shouldn’t laws be judged by this standard? Well I guess even that promise evolved, as women and blacks weren’t considered equal for some time.

At the end of the day, I don’t get so excited about “marriage”. It is clearly a failed institution, with more than 50% of all marriages ending in divorce. (Remember that percentage includes second and third marriages as well!) 28% of men and 15% of women cheat on their spouses. I’m with Joni Mitchell, who sang in 1971, “We don’t need no paper from the city hall keeping us tied and true.”

The issue though comes with all the rights given to you when you tie the knot. The right to have your foreign spouse get a green card. The right to inheritance. The right to be considered “family” in hospital visitation. The right to adopt in Arkansas. And many more.

If the government is going to confer these rights, it needs to confer them without bias. Call it civil marriage, and offer it to all equally. Let religious people have whatever religious ceremonies and marriages they want, as that is their right.

It’s forever hard for me to understand why all people don’t have a live and let live attitude. As I walk along the palpably changed and celebrating streets of New York, I can’t help but think that November 4 held out the both the historic promise and the tragic denial of the possibility of equality for all in the United States.

Kenneth Lang is a writer, performer, and organic gardener based in New York.