CALIFORNIA GAY MARRIAGE GROUPS LAUNCH BALLOT FIGHT

From Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO - Gay rights activists hoping to win back the right to marry in California submitted a ballot proposal on Thursday for the November 2010 election -- a date deep-pocketed advocates have said is too soon.

 

Californians in November voted to ban same-sex marriage after courts made it legal in the spring. Advocates ever since have been debating when to challenge the ban, known as Prop 8, in the state, which is closely divided on the issue despite a social liberal reputation.

The Los Angeles group Love Honor Cherish filed a proposed state constitutional amendment that repeals the gay marriage ban and says churches would not be forced to perform any marriage.

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Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ’Wait.’ But . . . when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; . . . when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored";  . . . when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From a Birmingham Jail  (April 16, 1963)
 
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