NAACP supports gay marriage

The good gay news just keeps rolling along.

The oldest civil rights organization in the country, the NAACP, has just endorsed gay marriage. Civil marriage, says the group, is a civil right and civil rights are for every American.

Hooray! This endorsement is a consequence of Barack Obama's recently announced support for gay marriage. But the NAACP sees him and raises the ante. None of this "leave it up to the states" crap for them. Nobody left black civil rights "up to the states" because "states rights" meant no rights for black people. We are citizens of the United States of America, not merely citizens of Idaho or Maine. All citizens enjoy the same rights: that's what the 14th amendment to the Constitution says. It was ratified in 1868 precisely to correct the Founding Fathers' error of minimizing the federal government's responsibility to articulate, define, guarantee, and protect exactly what rights citizens of the country possess. The correction the amenders proposed is simple: every citizen has every right and all citizens are equally protected by the law. Civil rights don't stop at state borders. You don't become a second-class citizen just because you cross a state line.

That rumbling you hear is the gay rights avalanche sweeping across this country. There's no stopping it. The feeble obstructions bigots have placed in their state constitutions will all be swept away by federal statute and Supreme Court rulings. We're not going to keep fighting a skirmish here and a skirmish there indefinitely. We're not going to fight the way the bigots want us to fight. We're fighting to win. We're going to win this war with overwhelming force and destroy our enemies. Period.