Postcards From The 8

To supporters of Proposition 8:

In 2006, after three years in North Carolina, one in Boston, and seven in Virginia, I moved back to my home state of California. Within 18 months, I’d procured a professorial post and an apartment and met the man I intend to spend my life with. We got a license at City Hall and married in the church of our choice. Since returning to California, I have had every opportunity to make a fulfilling home for myself.

An African American woman, I was regularly reminded that repression was so much a part of the fabric of Virginia that within my own lifetime I might not have been allowed to pursue the paths I’ve chosen for my life today. Made possible by the sacrifice, dedication, and vision of members of the African American community and their allies, the Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Acts, and hard-won laws and court decisions that banned segregation in public facilities and granted full access to education, marriage and property rights pushed America closer to forming “a more perfect union,” one that supports full and equal access to all and for all.

Distanced as some of us are from the strides toward civil equality this nation took in the twentieth century, we forget the details of many of the rights denied segments of our citizenry. Though I was a proud property owner while I lived in Virginia in the first decade of the 21st century, as recently as the 1970s, as an unmarried woman without a husband or father to sign the deed for me, I would not have been able to purchase my home. As an African American, I was only recently permitted the right to choose whom I married. African American marriages have not always been considered legal and binding, and even once that hurdle toward full citizenship was surmounted, Loving v. Virginia didn’t pave the way for interracial marriage in America until 1967. These are only a few of the examples of the ways that specific populations of Americans, women and Blacks in these instances, have been prevented from living their lives as full human citizens under the laws of their states.

Though I am not naive enough to believe no repression exists here in California, it was heartbreaking to witness, on November 4th, 2008, the decision on the part of so many to actively and consciously strip the full rights of citizenship from their neighbors. Californians tend to pride themselves on their independence and tolerance, and yet we have allowed Proposition 8 to debase and dehumanize our fellow citizens. I left Virginia because the legacy of old inequalities still clouded its citizens’ dreams for their futures, but here in California a new measure for promoting inequality has been approved. What a sad stain on our state. It was because of Californians’ vision and belief in the full potential of all men and women that I came back home. Now that I’m back, I am working hard with members of the Gay and Lesbian community and their allies to reclaim the rights of all California’s citizens to fall in love, to marry, to make themselves a home.

Toward a more perfect union,

Camille Dungy