Gay Marriage Bans = Jim Crow

Let me tell you about a visit I made to the King Center in Atlanta several years ago. I remember being in a gallery of information on the civil rights movement (as you might expect, since we are talking about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr here) and stopping to read a list of Jim Crow laws complied from across the South.

(If you're not familiar with the term Jim Crow, then we need to have a chat with your local school superintendent. For right now though, I've found the Dictionary.com and Wikipedia entries on the subject. Long story short: Jim Crow laws were enacted post-reconstruction to help institutionalize segregation of black and white Americans. )

I remember reading this list, and at first there was nothing in there I hadn't seen before. The famous bus seating laws, separate water fountains, separate schools, poll taxes, literacy tests, obstacles to ownership, and so on. Then I hit a new one of the list: it was illegal for a white man to marry/date/have sexual relations with a black woman, or for a white woman to do any of the same with a black man.

That brought the Jim Crow laws home for me. Until that point, it was hard to identify with the laws and their victims in more than a theoretical way (I was a white kid raised in a small Massachusetts town...I had no reference point). But once I realized that 50 years ago I could go to jail because I was seen kissing a black girl? It dawned on me just how instrusive, how demeaning, how out-and-out wrong the codes were.

It opened my eyes. I realized in a flash no matter what you may think, discrimination against one group really is discrimination against us all. Pretty deep stuff for a 16 year old kid.

What's this got to do with gay marriage bans? Simple: banning gay marriage, and the hundreds of other ways gays are discriminated against, are the same sort of mindless, habitual discrimination as Jim Crow laws were. It's one group of people telling another group "You're not good enough to do what we do." It's just as wrong as making blacks drink from different water fountains, and just as ludicrous.

I was out of the state when the vote on the Ohio constitutional ammendment happened. I was disgusted to learn it passed; I thought the voters in Ohio were more advanced. The ammendment is a human rights violation that demeans us all. Like most human rights violations, I expect this one to work its way through the court system and become a piece of history in due time. Not soon enough, but it will happen. There's simply no rational reason for ever creating second class citizens.

But that doesn't change the fact we're still currently living in a Jim Crow-esque society. We're still creating and enforcing second class citizenship. It's sad how many people don't even realize it.