Why do I advocate for equality in society?

I was driving home tonight from a couple of errands, and I found myself listening to an interview on CBC that really struck home for me. It was with lady, Velma Demerson, who had been arrested and imprisoned in 1939 for the awful crime of having a boyfriend that was of a different "race", and more horrifying still, for being pregnant.

The story is horrifying enough in itself, her words around the treatment she was subjected to while in a "reformatory" {a polite euphemism for a prison that could only have pleased Ebenezer Scrooge} was heartbreaking. She and her fellow prisoners were used as lab animals for some doctor's experiments.

The interview was very thought provoking. We live in an era that has seen both the flourishing of individual rights, and a rising tide of religious political activism. Legally, discrimination is not tolerated - for the most part - and certainly seldom officially sanctioned any more. Yet, there remain groups in society that are needlessly marginalized. Sometimes these groups are visible and obvious, other times, they are invisible minorities.

Simply put, we all owe ourselves and society a duty to question "common wisdom" when it is put before us. Common wisdom used to say that women shouldn't vote; common wisdom was used to justify racial segregation in South Africa; to ban books that might be "harmful"; you name it.

The same-gender marriage discussion has been a real eye-opener. It's a topic loaded with all sorts of taboos and misconceptions. The very topic itself causes people to recoil into the safe ignorance of their puritan ancestry; all kinds of misinformation is bandied about in a desperate attempt to prop up ideas that have been substantially disproven in the last 40 odd years. Some see it as a further erosion of their preciously held religious beliefs, and one more sign that society is going to hell in a handbasket.

The reality is that the topic itself cannot be intelligently discussed without some honest evaluation of your own assumptions. People, generally, don't seem to like to have their assumptions challenged. Committees even less so - hence the vehemence of the reactions from the various churches.

I have seen a few writers talk about same-gender marriage as a 'tool', as if there is some great conspiracy afoot among the GLBT community to usurp society. How a group who forms approximately 1% of the couples in Canada are going to "usurp" society by getting married is beyond me - so I must assume that this is a rationalization of the visceral and irrational fear of a different experience of the world.

As long as there are those who trumpet their beliefs from behind a cloak of false respectability, it will be necessary for the rest of us to challenge the assumptions and beliefs that make up their cloaks. As long as society continues to justify marginalizing its members it will be necessary to challenge the assumptions on which that is based.

Watching the political chess board in the US government, it isn't hard to see that BushCo. are busily trying to put in place the legal framework that would allow the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade - clearing the way for conservative legislators in a number of states to reinstate legislation that would once again restrict a woman's control over her own body. Why? On largely religious grounds that also are used to justify treating other people as lesser beings - usually on the misguided principle of the "greater good". Society is always the poorer when it excludes people from participation, and a poverty of diversity only serves the needs of the most mean spirited of people.