THE BELL CURVE:

Many years ago when Cesar Chavez and his followers were leading demonstrations all across California for decent wages and working conditions for farm workers, an old friend of war days and journalism battles called me from Laguna Beach to join him and the protesters there. When my response was a long, long, long pause, he said: “That’s not your style, is it?”

It wasn’t. Much as I supported the farm workers, I didn’t go. Instead, I wrote a magazine article extolling Chavez and his cause.

I thought about that last week when, with a pack of theatergoers, I twice passed among a group of protesters with their signs demanding social justice for gay people who are denied the right to marry by the passage of Proposition 8.

As with the protesting farm workers, I believed in the cause, but it wasn’t my style to join them. Instead, here are my placards, offered from the comfort of an office chair.

In the post-election fervor of acrimony over the victory of Proposition 8, the only relevant argument for reversing its passage has mostly been lost for both winners and losers in the noisy curbside demonstrations.

This was well illustrated in two commentaries on the Pilot’s editorial page Sunday, one a reasoned factual defense of the Mormon Church, which is accused of underwriting — both morally and financially — the passage of Proposition 8, the other preempting the high ground of morality to accuse the protesters of trying to create a “super class” for homosexuals “threatening to take away the rights of Americans.”

The second is easier to counter because it so blatantly segregates an identifiable group of Americans to be denied basic citizen rights on highly divisive moral grounds.

We’ve been gradually growing out of this sort of discrimination for two centuries. Same-sex marriage is simply the most recent step in this progression.

A little history illuminated the key issue of Proposition 8 for me. So maybe you’d like to join me in a brief walk through the high points.

It was less than 100 years ago — Aug. 26, 1920 — that women were granted the vote in the United States.

And 50 years before that, Susan B. Anthony voted illegally in the presidential election of 1872, was arrested, and said: “By thus voting, I not only committed no crime but instead simply exercised my citizen rights guaranteed to me and all U.S. citizens by the National Constitution beyond the power of any state to deny.

“It was the people, not the white male citizens, but the whole people who formed this union. It is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied.”

In 1965, the next island of discrimination was brought into the union by the Voting Rights Act, which delivered a nationwide prohibition against the facade of laws that had been created to prevent black citizens from voting, especially in the south. This was followed two years later by the U.S. Supreme Court striking down the last of the miscegenation laws in this country.

The case involved a black man and white woman who married in Virginia, were arrested, tried and sentenced to a year in jail unless they moved out of the state.

They did, then filed a lawsuit to set aside the judgment that worked its way to the Supreme Court and finally ended discrimination against mixed-race marriages in the U.S. The core of the decision said: “The clear and central purpose of the 14th Amendment was to eliminate all official state sources of invidious racial discrimination in the States.”

Next, we had the California Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriages in this state.

In the majority decision, Chief Justice Ronald George wrote: “An individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis on which to deny or withhold legal rights.”

And, finally, last week, the electorate of California — voting from a multitude of motives besides judicial — blindsided the latest seekers in this long litany of struggles against discrimination that have shown repeatedly that they won’t go away until justice is done.

The most compelling message in this history is not that the good guys finally win.

It is, rather, that the freedom won in each case was not a gift, given out as some token of generosity by the system it represents but rather an acknowledgment that every citizen has a full share in that system that can’t be denied or whittled away.

And that one of the linchpins of this society is that we finally get there. And will with same-sex marriage.

The morality argument in support of Proposition 8 can’t be debated. This is totally a personal decision that differs with every individual.

If one believes that the marriage of two other loving human beings, whatever their skin color or sex, can somehow demean or diminish their own marriage or bring down the society, we just have to move on to the people without such convictions who can factor in that the majority of Americans once also believed that women and black people shouldn’t vote and that people of different skin color shouldn’t marry.

And, oh yes, neither should people who are born with a different set of sexual wiring than we are.

Railing at the Mormon Church is also useless. Our tax laws take a hard line with organized religion’s participation in politics. Supporting a political candidate from the pulpit or the church collection can prompt a challenge to the tax-free status of the church.

But we don’t know if that happened or if there was any other behavior by the church that was either illegal or inappropriate. Presumably, this will all be explored.

Meanwhile, although they have made no secret that same-sex marriage “represents a critical moral issue,” I haven’t heard that the Mormons were sweating out a “super class of homosexuals.”

Moral issues are in the eye of the beholder. Birth control, for example, is a moral issue to Roman Catholics. A literal reading of the Bible is a moral issue to some. Dozens of different interpretations of the Bible are moral issues to the people who hold them.

In this space two weeks ago, I inexcusably demoted Paul W. Cook when describing his leadership in creating and administering Anaheim Union High School District’s Family Life program. Cook’s leadership role was very real, not as the Anaheim High School principal, as I reported, but as the district’s superintendent of schools. The reader who caught me was an old friend, Orange County Supt. of Schools emeritus John Dean.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.