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Earn your right to complain
November 3, 2008

Tomorrow is a big day. If you can vote, vote. If you cannot vote, take a friend to vote.

When it comes to this particular political process, I must admit that I have a very pathetic record. Embarrassingly I have never voted until this year. You are aghast. I know, I know.

I never thought my vote mattered. Texas , where I lived for 10 years, reliably went Republican regardless how I voted. California , where I live now, is staunchly blue.

But that is not the point. It took me a dozen of years to realize that voting is my way of earning the right to complain. It has broken my heart to see the environmental destruction in the last eight years. But you know what? I could not be bothered to vote in 2000 or 2004. So I shouldn’t be whining.

Vote. I have sent in my absentee ballot.

But before you vote, please consider a number of recent events.

The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.

Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining.

Thanks, this is really timely, since our drink water already contains rocket fuel.

Definitely check out the environmental scorecards of presidential candidates, senatorial candidates, and house candidates, thoughtfully put together by League of Conservation Voters.

Last, but not the least - if you are in California, you know that proposition 8 is highly contested. Please please read the incredibly touching and personal letter written by one of Greenbean’s family members. Every time I think about it, I am in tears.

It reminds me of Loving vs. Virginia case in 1967. I am stealing Wikipedia’s notes here:

“The plaintiffs, Mildred Loving (a woman of African and Rappahannock Native American descent, 1939 – May 2, 2008) and Richard Perry Loving (a white man, October 29, 1933 – June 1975), were residents of the Commonwealth of Virginia who had been married in June 1958 in the District of Columbia, having left Virginia to evade the Racial Integrity Act, a state law banning marriages between any white person and any non-white person.

Upon their return to Caroline County, Virginia, they were charged with violation of the ban. They were caught sleeping in their bed by a group of police officers who had invaded their home in the hopes of finding them in the act of sex (another crime). In their defense, Ms. Loving had pointed to a marriage certificate on the wall in their bedroom. That, instead of defending them, became the evidence the police needed for a criminal charge since it showed they had been married in another state.

Specifically, they were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section 20-59, which classified “miscegenation” as a felony punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five years.

On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. The trial judge in the case, Leon Bazile, echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s 18th-century interpretation of race, proclaimed that

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”

The Lovings moved to the District of Columbia, and on November 6, 1963 the American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion on their behalf in the state trial court to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence on the grounds that the violated statutes ran counter to the Fourteenth Amendment.”

After years of going in and out of different levels of federal and state courts, the Lovings was finally vindicated in 1967.

“The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in a unanimous decision, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia’s argument that a law forbidding both white and black persons from marrying persons of another race, and providing identical penalties to white and black violators, could not be construed as racially discriminatory. The court ruled that Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute violated both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In its decision, the court wrote:

“Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

Despite this Supreme Court ruling, such laws remained on the books, although unenforced, in several states until 2000, when Alabama became the last state to repeal its law against mixed-race marriage.”

Mere forty years ago, my husband and I would have been considered criminals by marrying each other.

We’ve come a long way and we have a long way to go.

Please vote.

CindyW at Organicpicks

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