You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
— Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A., 1984

I have a feeling that the word “historic” is going to become as overused in the coming weeks and years as “tragic” was in referring to “the events of…” you know the rest. Both words appropriately describe the outcome of the 2008 U.S. elections, but I will try to find others.

I started watching election returns while unpacking winter clothes, and gasped as Pennsylvania was called for Obama, knowing that meant he probably won. I didn’t vote for him: I didn’t like his non-universal health care plan; his timetable for withdrawal from Iraq seemed vague; his plan for addressing climate change and renewable energy even more vague; and he didn’t support equal marriage rights for all. I proudly voted for Cynthia McKinney and the Green Party, whose positions are in alignment with my values.

Another gasp when Virginia was called. This the state which until just 41 years ago outlawed inter-racial marriage. Mildred Delores, a black woman, married Richard Loving, a white man in Washington D.C. in 1958 to avoid the marriage ban. But upon their return to Virginia, police raided their home in the middle of the night, and arrested them - for being married. They were later convicted. Yes, the police actually invaded their home hoping to catch them having sex, also a crime. This isn’t ancient history, this isn’t slave times, this is in my lifetime. This could have happened to Barack Obama’s parents if they lived in Virginia.

In 1967 the United States Supreme Court overturned the conviction. In its decision, the Court wrote that marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man.” And that “to deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”



Is it such a stretch to substitute “another race” with “same sex”?

Without that ruling who knows when, if ever, Virginia would have decriminalized interracial marriage. And now in 2008 Obama has won the state! Remarkable! (Note that despite the Supreme Court ruling laws like Virginia’s remained on the books in several states until 2000, when Alabama became the last state to repeal its law against mixed-race marriage. Good ol’ Alabama. Forever bringing up the rear.)

So by this time things began to feel so momentous I needed to join friends at the local bar, which was packed with cheering and clapping people watching the results come in on the television. When a dramatic fire broke out down the block, only half the people left the bar to watch the fire; the rest, including me, remained glued to the television waiting for Obama’s speech. Yet another powerful moment was seeing Jesse Jackson, who was there when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in the motel in Memphis, also waiting for Obama, with tears streaming down his cheeks.

I went home elated that intelligence would return to the White House, after a long eight year drought. And while it is great to have that long chain of white male heads of state broken, on another level it really didn’t matter to me. I mean, look at Clarence Thomas, or Condoleezza Rice, or even Colin Powell, who lied to the world about Iraq. People whose politics and policies I abhor don’t get my support simply for representing a minority group. So my excitement for Obama went beyond the novelty of his race, and centered on his obvious intelligence and leadership qualities. I think I went to bed around 2:30 a.m., before west coast returns were all in.

(By the way, it is being said that Condoleezza Rice was rejected from consideration as John McCain’s running mate because she may be a lesbian. So they chose a woman who did not know that Africa was a continent over a PhD with 30 years of international and government experience who might be gay.)