Letters to the Editior: Civil Right Revisited

By Andrea Vukcevic

Just as society was slow to change on the issue of women’s suffrage and the separation of blacks and whites, the American public is teetering on another crucial civil rights issue. Should the government give same-sex couples the right to marry?

For many, this presents an uncomfortable moral and legal shift. In Myra Frederick’s March 20 op-ed titled, “Homosexual marriages are wrong,” she writes, “the law that is allowing these types of marriages to take place should not just be put on hold, as they are now, but they should be quickly abolished.”

Whoa, Myra. Is she referring to the same law that in 1954 determined separate-but-equal was, in fact, not equal and not constitutional? The judgment in Brown vs. Board of Education was just one stone of many in a foundation that prepared us for today, nearly 50 years later, when gays fight for a right that she wholly enjoys.

Frederick bases all of her arguments on God or the Bible, and there is room for neither in the legal or political system. Although the legal system once began as a codified version of religious principles, it is no longer depends on them and, as times change, they becomes less influential in our secular society.

It isn’t so much that Americans are uncomfortable with gay unions as they are with the word “marriage.” So why not change the word to “union” since marriage means “united in wedlock?” Regardless, anything short of giving homosexuals the exact same rights that heterosexual adults of all ages and races enjoy is unconstitutional and an infringement on their civil rights.

In a current broadening of values, the states have awakened to the sounds of equal rights chants. Bravo, Massachusetts and California, for leading the way.