Unity week at Cabrini College is not a week that should just be made known for students on campus. This should be a continuous and ongoing student movement to end the inequality injustices between same-sex marriages. Who are we to judge those who want to marry someone of the same-sex?
Unity week started on Monday, March 31, at Cabrini as a weeklong event sponsored by the Office of Student Diversity Initiatives and featured many other clubs on campus. On Tuesday, April 1, there was one specific movement that led an uprise against “haters.” This fierce and reflective student movement took place in Grace Hall to take a stand together for equality by holding a photo shoot for anyone to model and show their support. The purpose of the NOH8 campaign means so much more than what its title states. It was originally a response to the Prop 8 amendment that banned same-sex marriage in 2008.
According to ballotpedia.org, “Proposition 8 – Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry, was a statewide ballot proposition in California. On Nov. 4, 2008, voters approved the measure and made same-sex marriage illegal in California. On Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2010, a federal judge ruled that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional under the U.S. Constitution and barred its enforcement.”
However, upon its expulsion, Prop 8 created another amendment to the California Constitution, which stated that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. Before it passed, same-sex marriage was a “constitutionally-protected” right in California. According to ballotpedia.com, a majority of the justices of the California Supreme Court affirmed this understanding of the constitution in May 2008.
This student movement throughout our campus should be a student movement throughout the country. It should also be a nationwide effort as everyone’s responsibility, because nothing large changes with a few people, it has to be a collective effort to a cause especially when ample amounts of people believe in the change anyways.
There are 36 states that have banned same-sex marriage, either through legislation or constitutional provisions. Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey and Rhode Island are the six U.S. states that allow civil unions between same-sex couples, but not marriage. This number will go down to four this summer after Delaware’s new marriage laws take effect in July and the Rhode Island laws do on August 1, according to CNN. There are 1,138 federal benefits of marriage, 53 percent of Americans thought that same-sex marriage should be legal in 2013 according to a Gallop Poll, and there are only 14 countries where same-sex marriage is completely legalized in the entire country.
According to the Census Bureau, there were 646,000 of same-sex-couple households in the United States in 2010 and there was an 80.4 percentage growth of same-sex couple households in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010. Of those 646,000 same-sex couple households, 115,064 same-sex couples had children.
The actions taken by California on the banishment of same-sex marriage is unjust. As are the continuous actions to protest and put down any ounce of hope for same-sex couples to have a legal future together.
