Dear California,

WTF?

Now, I must say that I am normally a bit of a pessimist, or a realist at best, but the freedom to marry is an issue about which I am cheerfully optimistic. The fact is that those who wish to ban certain parts of the adult population from marrying whom they choose do not have a legal leg to stand on, and it is only a matter of time before their house comes tumbling down (pardon the mixed metaphors).

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the opposition's arguments are religious, which is all well and good, except that religion has nothing to do with the law that our country is based on. I don't care what the religious zealots want to claim, the United States of America was founded on a set of principles, and one of the most fundamental was the separation of church and state. This was particularly important to the founders of our country because most of them, or their ancestors only 1 or 2 generations before, came to the New World to escape religious persecution. Republicans love to quote Thomas Jefferson, because he was a champion of states' rights and lack of government intrusion. (More on TJ later, as I just read a fascinating biography, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson.) Jefferson practically created the notion of the separation between church and state, and it was a principle that was dearer to his heart than almost any other. On top of that, there is no more personal intrusion of government upon the life of an individual than the government legislating whom one is allowed to marry!

But didn't Jefferson believe that the people should be the ultimate legislators? And in CA, the people spoke, right? To address this issue, let's move on to the next great American president that the Republicans love to hold hostage as their own: Abraham Lincoln. (I also just read Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.) During the Civil War, when Lincoln was deciding whether to emancipate the slaves, did he take a poll to see what the people wanted? No. If he had, it would have been a landslide No, from both North and South. While it would be nice to believe that every citizen north of the Mason-Dixon line was a passionate abolitionist and civil rights supporter, it was hardly so. The northerners were certainly far more liberal than southerners, and slavery had been illegal in some of the northern states for decades, but the most common "liberal" opinion up north was "Slavery is an evil that should not spread to the new territories that are acquired." They hoped that the southern states would come to their senses, but most people agreed that they didn't have the constitutional right to tell other states what to do. In addition, although most northerners were morally opposed to slavery, most still saw the black race as inferior to the white race, and integration sounded pretty crazy to them.

My point? Public sentiment was against both emancipation of the slaves, and almost completely against any type of civil rights for black Americans. But would anyone today question Lincoln's decision to end slavery? Should he have taken a poll, assessed that the majority of the country was against emancipation, and then ignored the issue?

Of course not. Because it is a matter of 1) the constitutional rights of millions of American citizens; and 2) the right thing to do.