SOUNDING OFF:

On the steps of Los Angeles City Hall, a middle-aged man tells a crowd of young gay-rights activists what it was like to live in the era of Harvey Milk: “We felt like we were so close to full equality,” he says, “like we could reach out and grab it.”

Yet 30 years later, the passage of Proposition 8 reminds us that progress can be slow. For young people who believed that we grew up in an era of seemingly increasing acceptance, Proposition 8 has been a shocking and brutal assault. Proposition 8 invokes more than same-sex marriage; in many ways it is a litmus test for society’s tolerance toward gay people in general.

Take the television commercials that ran during the campaign. Supporters of the initiative threatened that legalized same-sex marriage would somehow endanger children. This insinuation revived the archaic misperception of homosexuality as a learned and shameful behavior. Many people oppose gay marriage because they believe homosexuals choose their lifestyle and society should not reward such behavior. Not only is this belief a fallacy, it is also an affront to our individual liberty.

In the Supreme Court’s original decision to allow same-sex marriage, marriage itself was only part of the ruling. The court reiterated that gay people are fully entitled to all the rights and responsibilities every group of society is granted. The court thus determined that discrimination based on sexual orientation was just as nefarious as discrimination based on race or sex. Yet in passing Proposition 8, for the first time in history, a bare majority overturned a court’s granting of full equality for a minority and enshrined discrimination in our Constitution.

While many voters saw this initiative as a matter of opinion, gay people saw it as a direct attack on their full social inclusion in the nation’s most diverse state. This is why gay people will not settle for second-class terminology, such as civil union or domestic partnership.

Yes, it may be easier to accept almost all the same rights under a different name, but the reason for severing the name from the rights is to separate one group of people from another. As history has proven, separate is never equal, and to deny same-sex couples the word marriage is to condone inequality.

TOM DE SIMONE is community vice president, Stonewall Young Democrats.