Cory Booker: 'Love is on the line'

In the video above, US Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) makes an impassioned speech on the Senate floor in favour of marriage equality. It’s a very good speech. As someone said in the YouTube comments, “This is 23½ minutes of a speech that will leave you a better person.”

Booker spoke with fire and passion about the story of Jim Obergefell and his late husband, John Arthur, and the fight to have their marriage recognised by Ohio. “Love is on the line, citizenship is on the line,” Senator Booker said. “We cannot deny the worth of one American without denying the worth and dignity and strength of our nation as a whole.”

Summing up the story and its importance, he added:

It’s a story not just of unconditional love and unconditional hope. It’s not just about the two of them, but it’s about our country. This is the story of all of us, of America. It’s a story of what our truth will be.

By making the speech in the Senate, it becomes a part of the Congressional Record. So, future historians, desperately trying understand how and why so many in the USA fought so hard to deny full and equal rights to LGBT Americans, will find this speech, and they’ll be able to actually see the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice.

But all of that is really beside the point. This is a great speech that lays out the case for freedom and justice so plainly that it practically demands universal agreement. The ever-declining numbers of Americans who have anti-gay animus in their hearts will continue to fight their lost war for years to come, and there are skirmishes aplenty ahead—some of which they’ll win, for a time. But future generations of Americans will look on them with disdain, even disgust. They won’t be remembered. But speeches like Booker’s, will be.

Love always eventually wins—always.