EQUALITY VICTORIES:
TOP 10
2013WAS LGBTs’ 1964 by thom senzee
movement. That was the year when landmark federal civil rights legislation aimed at ending racial segregation and institutionalized racial discrimination was enacted. That’s not to say racism ended in 1964, only that the awakening that began a year earlier with Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, reached a point from which there would be no falling back to sleep. The following is a top-ten list of positive developments for LGBT Americans during 2013, arranged by our best estimate of their lasting impact.
No. 1
The overturning of Proposition 8 by the Supreme Court of the United States Prop. 8’s thunderous collapse beats out the fall of DOMA by a
hair. Even though its direct impact is on same-sex couples living in California, the precedent of telling a state’s majority electorate that even it cannot deprive individuals of their right to equality under the law, simply because it may not like the gender configuration of their couplings is more reverberant than the court’s ruling on the federally binding decision in DOMA. The Prop. 8 ruling reaffirms the all-American tenet that says minorities deserve protection from the tyranny of the masses.
No. 2
2013 could very well go down in history as the 1964 of the American gay civil rights
The demise of DOMA The Supreme Court’s finding that nearly all aspects of the Defense
of Marriage Act are, in fact, unconstitutional essentially brought down a once-popular de facto ban on same-sex marriage. A necessity for DOMA to fall was an opportunity to present to the
Supreme Court a fundamental constitutional question that quietly plagued DOMA all along—and for five justices to be intellectually honest in their answer. The question was, do we really want a country in which a flimsily
contrived plot to deprive a minority of a right as basic as marriage by legalistically defining a word to exclude that minority? Thank- fully, it turns out that we do not.
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RAGE monthly | JANUARY 2014
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