four down & 46 to go...

ok, the fact is i never thought i'd live to see a black president. i did feel that a woman would make it before a black man. it seemed to me that racism was more deeply ingrained in the american psyche than sexism. i've got several reasons for believing this but that's really beside the point.

what i did NOT think i'd ever see is gay rights. ever. ever. ever. i haven't heard anyone specifically name whoever it was in the gay rights movement who thought to move the argument from "gay rights" to civil rights but that person deserves to be canonized. when i saw mike huckabee fumbling & mumbling on "the daily show" about "definitions of marriage," i knew it was just a matter of time for the movement to turn the corner. huckabee is an intelligent &, i think, compassionate man who was backed into the corner of an idiotic untenable position that denies a large group of people their fundamental rights as americans AND does harm to them. you could see the wheels turning in his head during this "shock of recognition" moment. i don't think he'll be jumping on the bandwagon but the fight had gone out of him. he's just going through the motions now. i expect that's what's happening elsewhere too.

now don't get me wrong here. i'm not some giggly gushing neophyte. this is america, after all. there's no better place for a person to firmly entrench themselves in a blind baseless position & defend it rabidly & nonsensically till the cows come home. there will be many more battles ahead, some won, some lost. but once THE COURTS accepted the gay rights issue as a matter of civil rights, it was a done deal. it's kind of like when the supreme court finally recognized the implicit right to privacy in the constitution. it was only a matter of time before a case like roe v. wade came along.

during the election, it meant a lot to ann that all the states she'd chosen to live in during her life(north carolina, colorado, california) went for obama. in this newest & more profound battle, it means a lot to me to see all the states i've lived in(florida, virginia, california)recognize gays are equal-status citizens. i think we're less than 10 years away from that happening.

patience & perseverance is what it's all about at this point.