CALIFORNIA GAY MARRIAGE CAMPAIGN KICKS OFF

From Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO - Gay marriage advocates on Monday launched a campaign to try to overturn California's same-sex marriage ban, hoping to become the first U.S. state to convince voters to approve gay people's right to wed.

In the five states where gay marriage is permitted -- Iowa, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont -- the right was achieved through court and legislative action.

In every state where the issue has been put before the voters, gay marriage has been rejected. Last year California passed its ban, known as Proposition 8, and voters in Maine overturned a state law allowing same-sex marriages two weeks ago.

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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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