Our founding fathers warned against tyranny of the majority, and safeguards against this concept are found everywhere in our country's infrastructure. Take, for example, the way our bicameral legislature is organized to avoid giving the biggest states the only power. Freedom of speech is protected for everyone, even such horrifying groups as the Ku Klux Klan.
But on Tuesday, Maine allowed the majority to take an already established right away from the minority. 52% of those who voted on the gay marriage issue chose to repeal the state's previous law, which allowed gay people to marry. In Maine, what is unarguably an minority rights issue was put to popular vote. Is this the American way?
What if, after the abolishment of slavery, the government gave U.S. citizens the option to repeal it? How much longer would it have taken to remove that scar from our country's history?
What about integration in the twentieth century? Think the majority would have voted to protect the black minority's rights? Certainly not. Our government had to forcefully implement integration laws amidst wide-spread protests from the white majority.
I know I'm not the first to argue this concept, nor will I be the last. And of course, this is not the first time that gay marriage rights have been banned by popular vote. But this time, it was to repeal an existing law. What kind of precedent does this set for the rest of the country? Five other states (Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Iowa) have legalized gay marriage. What if similar referendums were offered there? Our country would lose ground in the fight for gay rights and equality.
Many have tried to argue that this isn't a rights issue, it is simply that a marriage should be defined as between man and woman, and any other definition is immoral. Whatever your argument is about why gay people shouldn't be allowed to marry (it somehow makes your heterosexual marriage less "special", they can't procreate, it's just not natural!), the point is that once you vote against their right to marry, you are taking rights away from a minority that cannot possibly defend itself. You simply cannot argue that this isn't a rights issue.
And does it seem right to you that while we protect the civil rights of the KKK, Neo-Nazis, etc, we cannot bring ourselves to protect the rights of a group of people who simply want to love each other, be able to visit their husbands and wives in the hospital, have social security benefits, and have a say in what happens to their loved one after they die?
When we allow straight people, most of whom will never know what it is like to be treated as a second class citizen, to remove the rights of gay people, we are allowing for the tyranny over a minority that deserves protection.
