Racism, Sexism, and now Prop 8

I found out this evening, to my dismay, that my site was littered with “Yes On Prop 8” banners. Now, for those who live outside California and haven’t been following this, Prop 8 is a measure designed to introduce an amendment to the California constitution to ban gay marriage, basically ensuring that certain people would never have the same rights as others in this state.

Now I normally try to stay away from politics on my blog, but I want to talk about two points.

First, I don’t mind banners on my site that are designed to sell a product. People generally understand that an ad for an online web service or a product of some sort is not necessarily endorsed by the site it’s running on. Ads are everywhere and most people generally get that it’s provided by an ad service, and just ignore them.

What bothered me about the Yes On Prop 8 ads is that it felt as if I’m endorsing Prop 8. Somehow, it feels wrong to me. I’m not morally outraged about Sun Microsystems wanting to sell a server system or Microsoft wanting to sell an office suite. I am outraged about Prop 8. Products are fine to advertise on my site. Controversial freedom-limiting propositions I’m completely against are not.

I look back in our history and see that by and large, our generation is regretful of how we’ve mistreated people in the past. Shooting Native Americans used to be fine. Stripping away their rights and making them unequal was socially accepted. It was completely understood that if you’re black, you’re property. If you’re a women, you had no rights to vote and your opinion didn’t matter.

I like to think we’ve come a long way from that. People pride themselves on how we’re more mature now. Black, white, red, men, women. It doesn’t matter. This is the land of the free, the land of equality. So why is it that it’s still okay to discriminate against someone because their love of someone makes you feel uncomfortable?

It’s okay to not feel comfortable with gay marriage. A lot of people don’t. But do you feel more comfortable being part of a group of people that knowingly discriminated against another group, stripped them of certain rights that you yourself enjoy, simply because something you don’t have to deal with on a daily basis makes you feel uncomfortable to think about? Are you going to be okay with the thought of your grandkids or your great-grandkids feeling embarrassed because of how you voted, like how you feel about your great-grandparents’ racism? How much is preventing marriage for two people who love each other, in order to feel less uncomfortable, worth to you?

The Yes On Prop 8 advertisements often show the clip with the mayor of San Francisco saying “It’s going to happen, whether you like it or not!” It’s a good strategic clip for them to have chosen, as it can be interpreted as him saying “you have no say, we’re forcing gay marriage on all of you.”

I see it another way. I see gay marriage being inevitable not as an attack, but as the inevitable rise in tolerance that, over time, we’ve come to develop in this country. As a country, we don’t have the best track record of tolerance to new things, but we always mature in the end. This is not the last time we’ll face such mass intolerance and the limiting of rights of a group of people, just as this will not be the first time that we as a people will overcome our fears and begin to see us all as being equal.

So this is important. It’s not just about your level of comfort with those who live a different lifestyle. It’s about equality. It’s about overcoming personal fears. It’s about making an effort to keep this country on a path of freedom. Because if we start going back to our old ways of discrimination and fear, all we’re doing is regressing and limiting the rights of others out of some fear of the world spiraling into chaos. We’ve worked to abolish racism. We’ve worked to abolish sexism. The world is still here. We can do this again.

Vote no on Prop 8.