Intolerance Shown Towards Gays in Election

What a relief to finally be able to transcend race! Surely it justifies our unwillingness to acknowledge gay people as wanting, needing or deserving equal rights. After all, it's not like gay people have suffered the way that other groups have historically suffered. They were never slaves. They weren't forced off their land and repaid in blankets saturated with smallpox. The Holocaust doesn't belong to them. So what's a little "separate but equal" among friends?Except that it's not about which group throughout history has suffered the most. It's about the people who are suffering now.

You can argue like some do that gay marriage equates to sinning against God, using the Bible to make your conveniently unverifiable interpretations. You can use inane concepts like preservation of traditional marriage as your reasoning. Don't panic, you won't be called out on our easily discoverable history of redefining marriage. You can even lie on TV and scare the unaware masses into believing that their places of worship and their children are at risk. You won't have to say what the supposed risk is.

But if you voted in favor of Proposition 8, there is something you have to do. You have to acknowledge that you've chosen to designate an entire group of people as unequal to you.

Got that? They no longer have all the rights that you have, because you voted to take one of them away. Is marriage something worth fighting about? Not really. Declaring that certain individuals have one less right than you - for what seems to come from ignorance and bigotry -is something we all have to get very upset about.

Catholics and Mormons spent millions to "preserve traditional marriage." Did you catch the irony in Mormons making the argument for traditional marriage, given their history of polygamy? Traditional marriage for Christians, by the way, used to be defined as unbreakable. That's problematic when you consider how prevalent divorces have become in this country, tradition notwithstanding. Tradition also used to keep African-Americans from marrying outside their race. If that law had not been overturned, our President-elect would probably look a lot more like all the other presidents on our currency.

The "Yes on 8" campaign did pose one of the more important questions. After bleating on and on about the children, and what gay marriage might do to their curriculum, a little girl asks at the very end what she'll have to learn if gays are allowed to become legally monogamous couples. The former Sen. Rick Santorum will tell you, bestiality (you'll notice I said "former" senator).

What would that little girl really have learned? Tolerance.