This image seems almost too extraordinary to believe. A real rainbow on a day of gay protest, shining through the darkened clouds.
It was, according to Andrew Sullivan’s blog, taken at 3 pm today in Washington, D.C., as the protest against Proposition 8 was marching to Lafayette Square in front of the White House.
Sullivan is documenting the protests that occurred across America and around the world against the ballot measure in California that withdrew the right of gay marriage in that State. It was an ironic event, of course – occurring on the day that Obama was elected President – and it seems to be mobilizing the community in a way that hasn’t occurred in years.
We in Canada have the right to marry whom we wish. As one who is married to an American, this is one gay man who doesn’t take that for granted.
thanks for this Gordon – a nice reminder of how far we’ve come in some parts of our world, how close we are in many places, and how tragically far it seems in others.
The anti-gay-marriage propositions that passed serve as a reminder of how different America really is culturally to Canada and other places. Because we in Canada share a media market with the US, and speak roughly the same language, it’s easy to think that Americans and Canadians are more alike politically, socially etc.
When I moved to the US as a 23 year old, I was surprised to feel so much like a “fish out of water,” an outsider. My views on so many things from race, to religion to guns to health care were very alien to most people.
More recently, I got married in the state of Arizona (we eloped) and the bizarre culture shock was the number of hoops we had to jump through to prove we were “a man and a woman”. Interestingly enough, however, we noted in the fine print of the marriage rules that in Arizona it was now okay to marry your first cousin, so long as he/she was of the opposite sex.
The US really is a foreign country.
(And as a US citizen who votes in Arizona, I was shocked to see on the ballot this time a proposition to re-state the ban on gay marriage. It’s already not possible for gay people to marry in the state, but somehow some groups needed an exclamation point, which sadly passed)