This may be the most moving speech for equal marriage rights I’ve ever heard. Olbermann, a straight ally, sounded like he was on the verge of tears several times.



An excerpt from the transcript:

I keep hearing this term “re-defining” marriage. If this country hadn’t re-defined marriage, black people still couldn’t marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal in 1967. 1967.

The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn’t have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead. But it’s worse than that. If this country had not “re-defined” marriage, some black people still couldn’t marry black people. It is one of the most overlooked and cruelest parts of our sad story of slavery. Marriages were not legally recognized, if the people were slaves. Since slaves were property, they could not legally be husband and wife, or mother and child. Their marriage vows were different: not “Until Death, Do You Part,” but “Until Death or Distance, Do You Part.” Marriages among slaves were not legally recognized.

You know, just like marriages today in California are not legally recognized, if the people are gay.

And uncountable in our history are the number of men and women, forced by society into marrying the opposite sex, in sham marriages, or marriages of convenience, or just marriages of not knowing, centuries of men and women who have lived their lives in shame and unhappiness, and who have, through a lie to themselves or others, broken countless other lives, of spouses and children, all because we said a man couldn’t marry another man, or a woman couldn’t marry another woman. The sanctity of marriage.

How many marriages like that have there been and how on earth do they increase the “sanctity” of marriage rather than render the term, meaningless?

What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don’t you, as human beings, have to embrace… that love? The world is barren enough.

It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.

And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?

With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate… this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness—this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness—share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Read the entire transcript here.

In a recent email newsletter to members, Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese shared his thoughts about Proposition 8, the anti-gay-marriage ballot measure that narrowly passed this week in California:

Fifty-two percent of the voters of California voted to deny us our equality on Tuesday, but they did not vote our families or the power of our love out of existence; they did not vote us away. As free and equal human beings, we were born with the right to equal families. The courts did not give us this right—they simply recognized it. And although California has ceased to grant us marriage licenses, our rights are not subject to anyone’s approval. We will keep fighting for them. They are as real and as enduring as the love that moves us to form families in the first place. There are many roads to marriage equality, and no single roadblock will prevent us from ultimately getting there.

And yet there is no denying, as we pick ourselves up after losing this most recent, hard-fought battle, that we’ve been injured, many of us by neighbors who claim to respect us.

By the same token, we know that we are moving in the right direction. In 2000, California voters passed Proposition 22 by a margin of 61.4% to 38.6%. On Tuesday, fully 48% of Californians rejected Proposition 8. It wasn’t enough, but it was a massive shift. Nationally, although two other anti-marriage ballot measures won, Connecticut defeated an effort to hold a constitutional convention ending marriage, New York’s state legislature gained the seats necessary to consider a marriage law, and FMA architect Marilyn Musgrave lost her seat in Congress. We also elected a president who supports protecting the entire community from discrimination and who opposes discriminatory amendments….

But even before we do the hard work of deconstructing this campaign and readying for the future, it’s clear to me that our continuing mandate is to show our neighbors who we are.

Justice Lewis Powell was the swing vote in Bowers, the case that upheld Georgia’s sodomy law and that was reversed by Lawrence v. Texas five years ago. When Bowers was pending, Powell told one of his clerks “I don’t believe I’ve ever met a homosexual.” Ironically, that clerk was gay, and had never come out to the Justice. A decade later, Powell admitted his vote to uphold Georgia’s sodomy law was a mistake.

Everything we’ve learned points to one simple fact: people who know us are more likely to support our equality.

In recent years, I’ve been delivering this positive message: tell your story. Share who you are. And in fact, as our families become more familiar, support for us increases. But make no mistake: I do not think we have to audition for equality. Rather, I believe that each and every one of us who has been hurt by this hateful ballot measure, and each and every one of us who is still fighting to be equal, has to confront the neighbors who hurt us. We have to say to the man with the Yes on 8 sign—you disrespected my humanity, and I am not giving you a pass. I am not giving you a pass for explaining that you tolerate me, while at the same time denying that my family has a right to exist. I do not give you permission to say you have me as a “gay friend” when you cast a vote against my family, and my rights.

Perhaps Jesus spent so much time with social outcasts, not only healing them but allowing them to minister to him with hospitality and loving touch, to model a pattern of life that benefits us even more than “the other” to whom we reach out. Segregation stifles our moral imagination. If everyone close to you is a Christian, maybe it’s easier for you to compartmentalize the idea of eternal hellfire for the unsaved, to write off their torment as necessary sacrifices to the consistency of your idea of God. Similarly, if openly gay families are not welcome in your church, you’ll never see the facts that contradict the lies you’ve learned, the stereotypes about how their love and faith are not as genuine as yours.

To borrow from the language of law, it’s interesting to ask why certain stories in the Bible are taken as universal precedents, while the application of others is strictly limited to their facts. For instance, Catholics and some conservative Protestants believe that Jesus’ maleness is a relevant trait that should be required of all ministers who stand in his stead. None of them, as far as I know, have argued that priests should all be under 33, trained in carpentry, Middle Eastern, or of Jewish descent, though these traits–equally unrelated to one’s personal gifts for the ministry–would have been viewed by his own culture as important determinants of his identity. Gender essentialism is a presupposition we bring to the Bible, not a doctrine compelled by its pages.

Similarly, ambiguous “dicta”, so to speak, about pagan sexual practices in verses like Romans 1:27 are applied to today’s same-sex marriages in a way that brooks no disagreement, no openness to information about the character of those relationships then and now. Meanwhile, the “holding” of the story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10 somehow never gets applied by those who believe change is the enemy of Biblical authority rather than a fundamental part of the Bible’s storyline. Of course Peter had to eat with a Gentile, they might say. That was about the Jewish law being superseded–by us. That could never happen to us and the groups we believe are outside our holiness code.

If you have no idea what I was just talking about, this Torts outline from Chicago-Kent College of Law may help:

Qualifications to Stare Decisis

1. Holding v. Dictum. A court is not bound by the words used in a prior decision, nor all of the reasoning used; it is only bound by the legal principle or principles that were necessary for the previous court to reach the decision it reached….i.e., the new case is only bound by the HOLDING or RATIO DECIDENDI of the former decision.

2. The previous opinion may have talked about many things not necessary to the outcome. Such a statement is classified as DICTUM (or if more than one, DICTA)(sometimes OBITER DICTUM).

Why aren’t these binding? We have an adversary system. That principle of law was not argued by the litigants in the previous case, and not fully weighed by the court in deciding the previous case. Often, they are merely opinions of the court, and will not be applied in a case where the issue clearly is presented and fully argued.

So, when reading any decision, whether in a substantive course or for legal writing research paper, it is very important that you identify the exact holding of the case, and what is merely dicta.

3. The prior decision is binding only if the facts in the subsequent case are the same, or substantially the same, as in the previous case — i.e. if they are fully analogous.

If there are significant differences, the previous case may be “distinguished”, or are “disanalogous,” and will not be binding on the subsequent case.

That is not to say that the new case cannot reach the same conclusion, but the court in the new case is not required to follow the previous case. It may now extend that case’s reasoning to include the new case. On the other hand, it may conclude that the new facts are significantly different and require a different conclusion.

Perhaps all would-be theologians should go to law school…