Even as Virginia joins in the chorus of history by casting our vote to elect the first black man as President of the United States, we are joined in a form of religious tyranny by California, which recently amended its constitution to deny equal rights to homosexuals.
On the one hand, we give vehement voice to our newly rediscovered belief that in America, all men are truly created equal, while with the other we continue to declare that homosexuals are not as equal as heterosexuals. The words of our nation’s own lame-duck president recognize the religious nature of marriage. President Bush declared that “Marriage is a sacred union,” while at the same time epitomizing the hypocrisy of his too-often-shared belief in religious inequality by continuing with “between a man and a woman.”
The First Amendment of our nation’s Constitution declares that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”, yet both we Virginians and our distant cousins in California have declared that in our states the religious freedoms of homosexuals are subservient to our own righteous Godly beliefs. Let us join together now with chests swelled by pride as we overcome the despicable racial prejudices of our forebears, while at the same time our generation formally identifies homosexuals as the new brand of second-class citizens, who are to remain themselves separate but equal.
Robert Burson
SEAS 1983
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