We've heard these arguments before.

Does this quote surprise you? From the Supreme Court of Virginia:

The purity of public morals," the court declared, "the moral and physical development of both [sexes requires] hat connections and alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them, should be prohibited by positive law, and be subject to no evasion.

That's in keeping with Virgina being a state of hate, and utterly in keeping with the brutal anti-gay rhetoric we saw from North Carolina, in the run up to a hate amendment more extreme than Prop8. In NC, anti-gay "Christians" insisted that gay children should be beaten to "cure" them, and that gay men use cell phones as sex toys.

 Except that the quote comes from 1878 years ago, in a decision about inter-racial marriage laws. I changed the words in the bracket. (The correct quote is below).

 I recently read an excellent article discussing the efforts to outlaw inter-racial marriages, including efforts to amend the US constitution:

Here are four of the arguments they used:
1) First, judges claimed that marriage belonged under the control of the states rather than the federal government.
 2) Second, they began to define and label all interracial relationships (even longstanding, deeply committed ones) as illicit sex rather than marriage.
 3) Third, they insisted that interracial marriage was contrary to God's will, and
 4) Fourth, they declared, over and over again, that interracial marriage was somehow "unnatural." 

Does this sound familiar? It seems that anti-marriage equality advocates are really just the same as the racists of 150 years ago.

 The fifth, and final, argument judges would use to justify miscegenation law was undoubtedly the most important; it used these claims that interracial marriage was unnatural and immoral to find a way around the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of "equal protection under the laws." How did judges do this? They insisted that because miscegenation laws punished both the black and white partners to an interracial marriage, they affected blacks and whites "equally." 

This is no different than the argument that laws against gay marriage aren't unequal, because a gay man can marry a woman. (Would they want a gay man to marry THEIR daughter?) Oh, and the slippery slope argument? You know, that once we let "X" people marry, there will be incest and polygamy? Yup, they used that too.

Now, being black is not the same thing as being gay. Neither is being a woman. Neither is being a Jew.   The discrimination experienced by each minority group is unique to that minority. Yet it is also the same, because bias and bigotry are the same regardless of their target.  

Thus it behooves us to recognize that racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other "isms" are all rooms in the same house, one that would define some of us as "second class" simply because of who we are, or who we love, or what we believe.  The great achievements of the Civil Rights Movement stand as beacons to any group that is struggling for recognition. Dr Martin Luther King remains an inspiration to all of us, not just African Americans.

And thus, yes, we can take hope from the progress on civil rights for other groups, and hope that the arc of history really WILL bend towards justice.

The quote comes frome a decision in 1878:

The purity of public morals," the court declared, "the moral and physical development of both races….require that they should be kept distinct and separate… that connections and alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them, should be prohibited by positive law, and be subject to no evasion.