SAME-SEX MARRIAGE ACTIVISTS SEEK REPEAL OF CALIFORNIA'S PROP. 8

From The Christian Science Monitor

LOS ANGELES - The battle is on to repeal California’s Prop. 8 — which activists hope starts a national domino effect in the nearly 30 states that have banned same-sex marriage.

A coalition of 40 groups has taken the first legal step for voters to be able to overturn the measure in November 2010. Thursday, the groups submitted ballot language that will place the measure on the ballot in the state’s next general election. Within weeks they intend to be canvassing the state to gather 700,000 valid signatures needed by April to qualify the measure for the ballot.

The proposed measure will read, in part: “To provide for fairness in the government’s issuance of marriage licenses, Section 7.5 of Article I of the California Constitution is hereby amended to read as follows: Marriage is between only two persons and shall not be restricted on the basis of race, color, creed, ancestry, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation or religion.”

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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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