Dear Friend and Reader,<\/p>\n
Wednesday, San Francisco’s city officials and civil rights groups filed two separate cases to prevent Proposition 8 from taking effect. The Proposition, which passed on Nov. 4, takes away same-sex marriage rights in California.<\/p>\n
Black and Latino voters joined Mormons to aid in passing the proposition, a statistic that saddens racial minorities who empathize with this current civil rights battle and recognize their recent achievements in electing Barack Obama as president. Richard Kim of <\/a>The Nation<\/a><\/em> writes:<\/p>\n If exit polls are to be believed, some 70 percent of African-Americans voted Yes on 8, as did 52 percent of Latinos and 49 percent of Asians; each of these demographics went heavily for Obama, blacks by a 94-to-6 margin. Los Angeles County, heavily minority, went 50-50 on Prop 8. These results have shocked gay activists, who knew from earlier polls that black voters favored Prop 8, but they were seeing much smaller margins, closer to 50 percent.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n California is the first state to approve a ban after<\/em> the state Supreme Court decided in favor of same-sex marriage, and this is a primary argument that the law suits are focused on. Howard Mintz<\/a> explains:<\/p>\n The legal challenges filed Wednesday argue that a ballot proposition can’t be used to amend the state constitution when it strips away an established legal right, in this instance the equal right of gays and lesbians to marry. In court papers, gay marriage supporters insist such a provision can only go to the voters after being considered by the Legislature. As a result, they’ve asked the Supreme Court to block Proposition 8 from going into effect.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s looking likely, at this stage, that existing same-sex marriage licenses will not be taken away. There’s been a stay on issuing any new ones.<\/p>\n As the situation takes a hopeful turn in California, a candlelight vigil was held in San Francisco, attended by 2,000 people. My friend Linda Capato (the real kind of friend, not the McCain kind)\u0412\u00a0was there, and told me this:<\/p>\n It was really powerful,\u0412\u00a0it felt like my community was still really strong and hopeful…everyone’s so upset about this, and to not have that community support — I don’t know where I’d be to be honest.<\/p>\n So many folks were there, new couples…people with signs that had pictures of their wedding days…it’s pretty powerful to hear all the community leaders who are gonna fight…it was awesome,\u0412\u00a0but sad,\u0412\u00a0but empowering.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I don’t think I could sum it up any better than that.<\/p>\n Yours & truly,<\/p>\n Rachel Asher<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Friend and Reader, Wednesday, San Francisco’s city officials and civil rights groups filed two separate cases to prevent Proposition 8 from taking effect. The Proposition, which passed on Nov. 4, takes away same-sex marriage rights in California. Black and Latino voters joined Mormons to aid in passing the proposition, a statistic that saddens racial … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[526],"tags":[36,523,52,117,520,348,536],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5732"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}