“The time to do right is always right now.”
25 years ago today I met the man I married on Aug. 9, 2008. We celebrated our 25th Anniversary today by marching, along with 15,000+ fellow San Diegans, against the passage of Prop. 8, which ended the rights of same sex couples to get married in the state of CA, a right Luke and I exercised in August. The crowd was enormous as we marched down 6th Avenue alongside Balboa Park on one side and high rise condos on the other. As we turned the corner onto Broadway downtown, I looked back up the 6th Ave. hill, it was filled with marchers as far as I could see. I carried a sign that said, “Let’s Make Harvey Milk Proud Today.” Several “old” hippies like me were cheered by my sign. I suspect some young folks who marched didn’t know who Milk was and what part he played in the history of the Gay Rights Movement, which is one of the many benefits of this movement, all generations coming together, learning, feeling the energy. Cruising the web since I returned home I know one thing, this day will be remembered by all of us, all generations. The time is now.
Since Prop. 8 passed, I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard that it will just take a little more time, another few years, just wait a little longer, and people will get it and “allow” gay couples to marry. I’m tired of waiting. In the current issue of The New Yorker (11/17/08) David Remnick writes about Obama’s campaign for the Presidency. Remnick quotes the Reverend Joseph Lowery, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a leader of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, when he told an audience in Atlanta in January, 2007, that “a slave mentality” still haunted those who counselled Obama to wait his turn. Remnick continues: Lowery compared those who discouraged Obama to the white ministers who in Birmingham told Martin Luther King a half century ago that the time was not ripe for civil dissent. “Martin said the people who were saying ‘later’ were really saying ‘never,’ ” Lowery said. “The time to do right is always right now.”