Of Rights and Responsibilities

 Late nights, headaches, exhaus­tive preparation and planning, even occasional despair. Clearly the battle to strike down California’s Proposition 8 has been an all-consuming mission. Not just for our team but for the people across the country who supported us and tracked the case online, hoping that a federal district court would deliver justice denied to gay couples throughout the state as the result of an insidious ballot measure. And on August 4 it did, affirming that ours is a nation that can indeed live up to ideals upon which it was founded, that liberty and justice truly are for all of us. Rarely are there moments in life so emotional as that summer afternoon in San Francisco, when we shed tears of joy with our plaintiffs, Kris Perry, Sandy Stier, Paul Katami, and Jeff Zarillo.

Today, while we at the American Foundation for Equal Rights continue to celebrate along with the rest of the gay community, our joy is tempered by the reality that ultimate victory awaits. The defendants in this case quickly appealed Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s decision to the U.S. court of appeals for the ninth circuit, assuring that this fight will not be over until it’s argued before the Supreme Court.

And so once again we plan and prepare, albeit with a greater sense of confidence, because the court’s 136-page ruling uses facts, evidence, and the law to validate gays and lesbians not as “special” but simply as American. As David Boies, who led this legal fight alongside Theodore Olson, said after our victory, those who vigorously oppose marriage equality “will attack everything they can think of to attack—except the court’s opinion. Because I guarantee you that they’re not going to be prepared to deal with what the opinion has found.”

For me, this case has always been about who we are as a nation. Election Day, 2008, left me profoundly conflicted. On the one hand, a nation that had been legally segregated mere decades ago had elected a progressive African-American to the presidency. Here was an unequivocal example of the American capacity for change, tolerance, and the equality that we cherish.

At the same time, California, a state that to me has always symbolized the best of the American dream, declared countless people to be inferior, officially relegating them to a separate class with different rights.

But I had grown up, as all of us have, being taught that ours was a nation where we are all created equal. Indeed, equality was the promise upon which this nation was founded, and since then we have struggled as Americans to bring our daily reality closer to our founding principles.