Who's Equal?

Via Jesse at Pandagon, we have this great little tidbit out of Virginia, where the legislature has just passed a bill allowing the creation of anti-gay marriage license plates. Apparently, the license plates will say "Traditional Marriage" across the bottom, with a couple gold rings and a heart, or something equally as cheesy.

I don't think I even need to begin to explain why this is so wrong, in so many ways. Not only has VA already passed a law banning the recognition of gay marriage, civil unions, domestic parterships and, just for good measure, any other "contract or other arrangement" that gay or lesbian couples might conceive of entering into, but they also decide to promote this inequality with a proud little "I'm a Homophobic Heterosexual" license plate, just so they can make sure they can publicly identify the gay lovers from the gay haters.

Now, I have nothing against vanity, "for a cause" license plates. In fact, I have a Red Sox/Jimmy Fund plate like this on my vehicle right now. Usually, these plates support a charitable organization that the driver of the vehicle identifies with and wants to promote. In my case, it's funding cancer research for little kids. There's a whole slew of other choices, at least in Massachusetts, and all of them can be considered worthwhile.

When a state legislature in the United States, the land of equality, votes to support a license plate that tacitly condones the marginalization and forced inequality of an entire segment of the population, however, there's something seriously wrong with the direction in which this country is heading. I won't get cute and spin this out to it's most ridiculous extreme, like anti-interracial marriage plates, or anti-women voting plates, but it's easy to place these new VA plates in the same category.

It's important these days to take a good, hard, and personal, look at what will most assuredly become the next large civil rights battle this country will face. Equal rights for gays and lesbians - including the right to marriage - is something I'm proud to stand up for, and I'm proud that my state has done the same. It's incredibly scary for me, even as a heterosexual, to see what is happening to a considerable minority of our citizens, whether it's through tacit prejudice or this and other overt promotions of inequality. Put yourself in their shoes as sons, daughters, parents, friends, neigbors, voters, taxpayers, community activists and yes, even soldiers in Iraq, who, no matter what they do, are considered unequal in the eyes of the law. And, standing in their shoes, imagine seeing your fellow citizens declaring boldly, for everyone behind them at the stop light to see, that they think that marginalization should continue because they can't wrap their heads around the fact that, sometimes, definitions have to change.