Liberty & Justice for All

Yesterday, July 26, 2013 the Supreme Court of The United States of America ruled that The Defense of Marriage Act - a discriminatory 1996 federal law that declared that individual states had the right to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states - was unconstitutional.

No kidding.

You know, our country's founders were rabble-rousers. They were heretics and rebels. They were black sheep - going against the grain. They believed in something new, something fair and beautiful. Those men fought to enshrine freedom as well as democracy in our floundering little republic. They didn't have everything right - at that time only white, male land-owners were thought to deserve justice, equality, and the freedom to live their lives as they chose. But as our country has continued to progress from that time forward, we have continually returned to that one, hopeful, idealistic premise that we are all equal.

Contrary to revisionist-history stories we may hear from conservative pundits, those men who believed in America, fought the Revolutionary War, wrote the Declaration of Independence, and signed our nation's Constitution . . . they were the liberals, the hopefuls, the visionaries and progressives. They weren't interested in "conservative values" (read: staying loyal to the British Crown) - they were interested in moving forward, creating justice and equality for all. They wrote that no one religious ideology (such as Protestant Christianity) could be dictated from the state or federal level so that everyone would be forced to behave similarly. They wrote that we should all be free to live according to the dictates of our own consciences!

We were not founded on conservative religious values of believing in one god who created us all a certain way - we were founded on progressive, humanistic values of believing that all human beings deserve to worship & live free! Let us never forget what it must have felt like to be a woman dying in the Revolutionary war so the privileged white men around her might one day be free. Or to be a Native American, continually forced off the lands of your ancestors so these white people spouting their ideals of freedom could live there instead. Or to be a black soldier in the Civil War, fighting for the North for little to no pay, volunteering on the sheer glimmer of hope that one day you would no longer be considered only 3/5ths of a human being.

If you had been one of those Revolutionary War Heroines in the 1700's, would you have ever believed that one day, in the year 1920, your great-great-great granddaughters would receive full voting rights in this new democratic republic?

If you had been a member of one of the Native American tribes being pushed perpetually west, could you have ever imagined that one day, perhaps, this "new" country would finally fully recognize and compensate your great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren for the many losses your people had suffered at their hands? (This has most certainly not happened yet).

If you had been, in the 1860's, one of the brave 170,000 black men serving in the Union Army, or 19,000 serving in the Union Navy, could you ever have believed that one day, in 2008, a black man would be elected Commander in Chief of this nation?

Our nation's history is not all freedom, peace, justice, and equality. We still have so much work to do to "arrive" at that - truly, for all - but we are getting there. We are still fighting a Revolution - let us not stop until we do have Liberty & Justice for All.