2008
The Shackles That Remain
Through the victory of President-Elect Obama, a great step has been made toward the dream of equality. I am proud to say that I voted for him and truly believe he will be a great president.
That said, the dream of equality also took some serious hits. Voters in Arizona (my home state), Florida and California have approved ballot measures banning gay marriage. And Arkansas has approved a measure banning gay adoption.
As a society and a nation, our hands may be free, but our feet remain shackled. The abomination of hate continues to deny all people the dream of freedom, because as Dr. King so aptly put it, “No man is free until all men are free.”
Hate is a sneaky demon. It lurks deep in our hearts, disguised as righteous indignation and moral outrage. It hides in our religiosity, in our cultural biases, in our attachments to tradition and in our personal insecurities.
We cannot let these temporary defeats keep us from our mission to banish hate and bring equality to all people. Even the march toward racial equality faced brutal setbacks in the forms of the Dred Scott Decision and Plessey v. Ferguson. And now those hateful decisions are relegated to the history books and no longer on the law books.
It took 150 years from the Declaration of Independence to 1920 before women were granted the right to vote in this country. And they constituted half the population.
It took centuries on these shores before the descendants of the first slaves were freed by President Lincoln. It took nearly another century before Brown v. Board of Education declared that separate was not equal. It took another decade yet before the Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act were passed in the 1960s. And finally another forty years before the first African-American president was elected.
We may not see marriage equality in our lifetime. But we stand with the millions who came before us working towards the dream of freedom and equality. We are not alone and our efforts are not in vain.
Bear in mind that it will not be sufficient to hold rallies, preaching to the converted. It will not be enough to donate money to pay for ads on TV. We must search our own hearts for the hatred that lurks deep. We must free ourselves of anger and violence towards those who persecute us. Only by opening our own hearts can we ever hope to open the closed hearts of others.
Our enemy is not the hater but hate itself. It is a demon whose mission is to rob us of our joy. And we must exorcise ourselves of this demon as individuals and as a people. We must be ever vigilant in this because hate is subtle and insidious. It will whisper to you that it is gone even as it reshapes itself as false morality.
To remove the shackles that remain, we must practice the way of peace. We must not simply teach compassion. we must live it. We must Practice Empathy And Compassion Everywhere. In doing so, we will give hate no place to hide. We will shine the light of love on every corner of our psyche as well as our society.
Last night, we elected a president who stands for hope. He may not support our efforts for marriage equality, still it is another step in that direction. I believe he is a wise and compassionate man who may yet work towards helping us all remove the shackles that remain.
Peace,
Dharma Kelleher
www.dharmakelleher.com
Wonderful piece of writing – off to check out your website. As a fellow Arizonan my heart is both heavy and light this morning. So much gained, so much lost (here and across the country). Now, I believe, the real work begins.