I sit and ponder over a great many things. Physics, chemistry, biology, health care…these are only some of the things I tend to sit and think about. They’ve taken the center stage as of late, but not because they are the most important. Their application deals with the human condition, and so I consider them of value. There are other things that deal *more* directly with the human condition.

This year’s mid-term elections were, for me, a let down. The fact that the democrats stole back the house and senate was somewhat nice, in so much as I tend to agree more with the democrats than the republicans. But really, neither party suits me *well*, just the democrats suit me passably. What was really my problem with the mid-term elections was the number of states that passed constitutional referendums outlawing gay/lesbian marriages.

The history of society, from the dawn of recorded history until today, has been a story of evolution. All throughout history, we have oppressed, raped, murdered, stole, cheated, and otherwise destroyed human beings. Always, there was one or two issues that were the most horrific at the time. Genocide (multiple times, the jews in Germany, Aztec and Incan civilizations), enslavement of an entire race (multiple times, Israelites, Egyptians, African Americans), improper executions and killings (again, multiple times, the penal system in the dark ages, the inquisition, the crusades, the Salem Witch Trials, our civil war and our treatment of slaves). As we have evolved as a society, we have shed ourselves of these inhumane acts time and again. We have slowly, almost painfully slowly, loosened the grip of our fear and instinct that drives us to these horrors and instead embraced tolerance and understanding. Never has it happened without a fight though. The people being mistreated must always show the people doing the mistreating that their acts are wrong, and the people committing the crime never believe them. So the cycle continues.

I prefer to think that a person could graph this cycle in the form of a spiral, like a seashell. In the center, the earliest and most atrocious crimes against humanity. Then, as we progress as a society, the spiral moves outward, and the crimes become lesser, and society better.

Today, we still have atrocities in our society. If you look at it on a global scale, there are very horrendous things taking place. But, if you pull back to just our nation, the picture is brighter. And this is why gay/lesbian rights are now in our minds. In the 1500s, if you were a gay man, working for a lord, barely surviving on the small amount of food you were allowed to keep while working 16 hour days, you didn’t complain about the fact that society didn’t accept your sexuality. In the context of your indentured servitude, that was a minor thing to complain about. You hid it, you maybe got lucky and found someone to surreptitiously share it with, but you didn’t complain about it or ask for it to be changed. Today though, that has changed. The core layers of the seashell, the right to life itself, the right to liberty and self determination and freedom from slavery, these things are now well settled here in America. Once a person has the right to their own life, and the right to their own self determination, the single most important thing next on the list of things that contributes to an overall happy life is the choice of person that you spend that life with. Of course, the majority thinks that life is good as it is and nothing should change, but that’s only because they are already free to choose the best mate to spend their lives with. None of them have had to make a choice between spending their life with the person they both love and are attracted to, or having access to membership in an exclusive club known as society. The majority has nothing to gain by allowing gay/lesbian marriages, but they fear they have something to loose (and in truth, slave owners had something to loose by granting slaves freedom, whites had something to loose by granting minorities equal standing, the majority almost always stands to loose something when they quit oppressing another group, but the real issue isn’t whether the majority stands to loose something they value, but whether they ever had a *right* to what they stand to loose in the first place). And so the fight goes on, and the seashell gains yet another section.

But the gay/lesbian community WILL win. There is no doubt of that. One need only read our own Declaration of Independence to know why. There are three things that the Declaration of Independence claimed we all had an inalienable right to: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For all that the anti-gay community screams at the top of their lungs that the gay lifestyle is a choice and that they shouldn’t be choosing it, they miss the most important fact of all. The gay/lesbian community *DOES* choose it (no, I’m not saying it’s a choice to be gay or lesbian, I personally think that’s the way they are born, I’m just pointing out that it’s *irrelevant* whether they choose to be that way or born that way, because in the end, they are *free* to choose that lifestyle if they wish, or so our Declaration of Independence would teach us), even in the face of hate mongering teenagers that use baseball bats to beat a high school student to death for his effeminate attributes. What this means is that it is *MORE IMPORTANT* to a gay/lesbian person’s happiness that they be who they are than it is to have all the things that society currently takes away from them once their preference is known. For a person to sacrifice so many aspects of their life that contribute to happiness, to deal with ostracism and being an outcast, to willingly mark themselves a target for the scorn, ridicule, and derision of our society, all in order to be able to be with the person that suits them best as a companion, mate, life long friend, and the person that shares the ups and downs of their life, is prima facia evidence that their choice is no choice at all, but a prerequisite to their attempt to fulfill one of their three inalienable rights: the pursuit of happiness.

It is for this reason alone that I *KNOW* that gay/lesbian rights are the next thing to come on the seashell of the evolution of our society. We’ve already covered self determination for Native Americans, freedom from slavery for African Americans, civil rights for women, and civil rights for minorities. The next item on that list has now popped it’s head up and said “I’m here…let’s start dealing with me.” Of course, as is always the case, the majority doesn’t want to change. They have no need to. But that’s irrelevant. The majority *NEVER* wants to change. It is always the downtrodden that force the issue. The only question then is whether or not people in the majority have the vision, the clarity of mind, to see the movement for what it is, simply another step in the evolution of our society as we continue to wring out the injustices that live farther out on the seashell and do the right thing even though it doesn’t benefit them, or whether the people in the majority are so callous and unsympathetic to their fellow human being that they would willingly overlook their fellow human’s pursuit of happiness simply because they choose to remain blind and ignorant.

I am neither blind, nor ignorant. The time has come, it *WILL* happen. Now we need only make it come to pass.