FORWARD MARCH! Part #1

FORWARD MARCH!

                                                               Part #1

It's Friday, and this week has been very productive at work. We have some accomplishments to celebrate together. I come up with an idea for a pizza party. If I can collect $3 from all of our colleagues I can provide two large slices to everyone. When I come to you for your donation, you're one of those health conscious types and not necessarily fond of pizza but you're also a team player so you gladly pitch in your $3, and to make sure there's enough leftover to serve those who might be extra hungry, you pitch in an additional $3. Within about an hour, the pizzas arrive hot and fresh with its sensuous aromas of Italian seasoning wafting throughout the workplace. You hadn't had lunch yet and your tummy has begun to groan. When you see your co-workers walking away from the break room with slices of pizzas layered with thick, gooey cheese, fresh peppers and pepperonis you think you might as well help yourself to a slice. You would save time and you're going running this weekend anyway. As you walk through the break room where the pizzas are spread, I immediately grab a measuring tape and proceed to take your height. When your hands move to help yourself to a slice of pizza, I crack your knuckles with a wooden spoon and explain to you that pizza is only for those who are of the height 5'9" or taller and that you are only 5'8". You ask me to explain the reason and I state that the Surgeon General has made a law that states those 5'8" or shorter on average do not expend enough calories on a daily basis to make eating pizza a smart food choice and are thus forbidden from eating pizza for concern it will make our society fat. You then explain to me that your genes would never allow you to be taller than 5'8" and that you do enjoy pizza on occasion. I tell you your height is a choice and then offer you some solutions. You could always go to a bone reconstructionist and get your limbs stretched or you can stand on stilts so that you too can be of normal height and at the next pizza party we host, you can then take part. Nothing personal...just business. Your feelings are now hurt on top of being hungry. You are then left trying to figure out what you did wrong. Wait, you must be an evil person with bad morals for wanting pizza like anyone else.

With this allegory, I ask you to take height and replace it with sexuality. Take pizza and replace it with the civil rights and benefits of marriage. Take your pizza donations and replace it with your tax dollars used to support the institutions which offers these rights. Take the Surgeon General and replace it with the Georgia General Assembly. And take this bone reconstructionist and replace it with those professionals engaged in the deemed unethical work of sexuality reparative therapy. Those who marry against the grain of their natural sexualities are your stilt walkers. And I am acting as your helpful county law clerk.

If you agree that we live within a republic of democracy, then what lawmakers create down at the Gold Dome in Atlanta are not actually laws at all. If they were, then our laws would never change at all and apply to all people universally as the Law of Gravity or the Law of Reciprocity. Real laws can not be created, they just are and always have been. They have no rhyme or reason but that they provide the basis from which all reality is derived. And if they were not just, then reality would contradict itself and nullify its own works. All known reality would then short circuit itself. You would not be able to calculate any sound mathematical equation by it. In this sense, it is impossible to break the law, you can only break yourself against the law.

What legislators actually create are public agreements with the constituencies they represent to abide by a certain code with a purpose of beneficially making life better and safer for all those it concerns. The process is that they propose a code which addresses those ends and then they must work to gain an agreement with the full legislature and the people in order to make it then so-called law. Whenever a particular code fails to achieve this purpose or does the inverse, any American who is paying attention ought to disagree with it. And I don't mean passively agree to disagree with it. I mean to maladjust oneself to the injustice, to totally get out of alignment with that which is wrong. This is how you break laws which should have never become law in the first place. When unjust laws of this order are broken, we then see that they were never laws in truth to begin with as the now the dead Jim Crow and antimiscegeny statutes.

I am not in any way advocating anarchy. I would actually agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all." St. Thomas Aquinas would also concur in that, unjust laws are not aligned with eternal law. "Any law which uplifts human dignity is just. Any law which degrades human personality is unjust." Therefore, all marriage discriminatory statutes are unjust because it sets up a different set of rules and benefits which do not apply to all and the results are inequality. Discrimination destroys the self-esteem and self-worth of those it leaves out. It many times breaks spirits beyond repair. It gives the included a false sense of superiority and the excluded a false sense of inferiority. Either "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal who are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights which among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." or our national constitution is a blatant lie. Thomas Jefferson knew not what he was talking about. Abraham Lincoln was just another delusional utopian dreamer, whose philosophies never truly came down to earth to set African Americans free from bondage. And Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was just another quack doctor who wrote America his prescription through a fantasy he called a dream. I too am out of my mind. And perhaps you are a fool as well in need of a dose of reality if you believe in this.

Even if it were not for the direct benefit of oneself, all of us who wish to live in a more harmonious, loving and fair society and are dedicated to the best interests of our state and all of its inhabitants, have a duty and a responsibility to break the backbone of such legal injustices. Those of us who are in positions to change laws have a responsibility to now begin the hard work of changing them or accept being part of the problem which we must overcome and remove. Those of us compelled to cooperate with unjust laws, have a responsibility to disobey them and not comply, such as clergy members, justices of the peace or county law clerks, or accept their contributions to the problem. Those of us targeted and victimized by unjust laws have an incumbent responsibility to challenge them by petition, communicating our demands to our legislators and by peaceful yet assertive protest or there shall be no sympathy for us. We must also get better at engaging our loved ones, those closest to us, friends and family about why marriage equality matters and encourage them to take some form of action as you have. We must put aside our differences, our pride, our arrogance and resentments and reach out to one another and pull together all of the disjointed factions of this state’s LGBT population into one strong united front. The urbanites must join hands with the rural dwellers. Lesbians must become true siblings and best friends with gay men and vice-versa and not leave out their trans and bi siblings. We must get better at race relations and class relations than our heterosexual counterparts. We could do this by welcoming inclusion and respect, by embracing, honoring and representing the beauty of our diversity instead of trying to whitewash or standardize our image to the alienation of those who do not fit into that self-imposed image. We don’t need to assimilate but we must belong to one another and recognize that this is much bigger than the concerns of just one group. Our youth must seek the wisdom of their elders and our seniors must appreciate the innovations of our youth and take their places as respectable guides. We must include the populous strength of our ordinary everyday people in this work as leaders and not have this struggle dominated and controlled by the self-imposed leadership of an overbearing and cliqued up elite. We must invite the support of our straight allies and educate them about our needs. We must commit ourselves to doing whatever we can and must do to offer our talents, our skills, our passions, our stories, our money, our time, our prestige and our connections to those organizations which are committed to doing the work of organizing and mobilizing a movement to directly dismantle these legal injustices like The Love Under Fire Campaign on the state level in Georgia.

As Americans, we have a right to do this if anyone was senselessly waiting for me to come along and give them permission. I have heard certain persons cry out in desperation, “What in the world is it going to take to finally bring marriage equality to Georgia?” And I have just told you. Look not beyond yourselves. I am no genius imparting some innovative wisdom which has not been successfully tried and proven in the past. This kind of self-determination and unification is what has always worked to free people from the abuses of an oppressor, from the early Christians to the Revolutionary Americans to the Indians of Gandhi’s era to the African American Civil Rights movement and I know it will work just as effectively for us today. We are not required to subject ourselves to laws which degrade and do not uplift.

((Continuation of this discussion in Part #2))