Celebrating happiness and love

The American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that successfully fought to end California’s anti-gay Proposition 8, recently posted this video, “Inside Look: AFER's Prop 8 Victory and the First Weddings”. It’s heart-warming to see such unbounded happiness, and great to re-live the liberation from a long nightmare.

And yet, as they say, haters gotta hate: The anti-gay bigots who desperately tired to defend the unconstitutional Prop 8 have filed a hopeless lawsuit in California state court seeking an injunction to halt marriage equality in California and to reinstate enforcement of Prop 8. Their utterly bizarre excuse for their stunt (because that’s what it is) is that they apparently think that the ruling only applies to the two counties that were named in the federal suit. Perhaps their reading comprehension is somewhat lacking.

The bigots’ inability to understand court rulings isn’t their only problem: They also don’t understand how federalism works in the USA. As San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera pointed out:

"The opponents of the freedom to marry have chosen to ignore the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and the well-settled California marriage case of Lockyer v. San Francisco, which they themselves celebrated at the time. Their motion has essentially no chance to succeed. The most basic concepts of American law tell us that a state court cannot and will not overrule the federal judiciary.”

Herrera is moving quickly to get the bigots’ bizarre stunt tossed out by the court. He also said what so many of us are also thinking:

“The citizens of California are left wondering when these people will realize that, having lost the moral struggle years and years ago, they have now lost the legal struggle as well. Marriage equality is now the law in the State of California, and will remain so from this point onward.”

Indeed, when will the bigots realise they’ve lost? And further, that sooner than any of us realise, marriage equality will exist throughout the USA? The simple answer, I think, is that most of them do know the war is over, apart from a few closing skirmishes, and their side lost. Soon, their hate groups’ very reason for existing will be gone.

I’m certain that’s exactly why the California bigots have pulled this stunt: Money. When the last state law banning the freedom to marry is finally struck down, how will these people make any money? They’re clearly not intelligent or talented enough to make their riches in fields that would be useful or beneficial to society, so they have no choice other than to keep their hate campaigns going.

That means that the bigots will carry on fighting against the freedom to marry, and they’ll keep pulling bizarre stunts, until they come up with some other issue to hitch their cavalcade of hatred onto. It’s all they know how to do, and it’s something they know they can make a lot of money from.

And that’s the real pity in this. The video shows the happiness of people who can finally get on with their lives. The bigots, on the other hand, are determined to fight others’ happiness, to combat love and to spread hatred. It’s an incredibly stark contrast. In the end, happiness and love always triumphs. It’s really sad that the bigots just won’t accept that, they won’t stop wallowing in negativity and they won’t move on to doing something positive for society. That’s their choice. The rest of us choose to move forward and to celebrate happiness and love. That’s why we win.