ONE YEAR AFTER PROP 8, PUSH FOR MARRIAGE CONTINUES

From Bay Area Reporter

One year ago this week, marriage equality advocates in San Francisco and around the country were shocked by the passage of Proposition 8, which eliminated same-sex couples' right to marry in California.

In the weeks after the measure passed with 52 percent of the vote, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to express their agony and anger. Last month a march for LGBT equality in Washington, D.C. drew an estimated 100,000 people.

This week, interfaith services were held around the state in advance of the vote in Maine and to mark the passage of Prop 8.

In Oakland, about 75 people gathered at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church Monday, November 2 for a service of song and reflection. The Reverend Roland Stringfellow talked about "people whose hearts are broken."

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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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