i'm on a listserve for missourians who were fighting against amendment 2 before the election earlier this month and they still write each other about issues now and then since the defeat at the polls. i asked one of the respondents today if i could quote her from an email she sent around, as i liked it so much. and, as such, it's below:

"Back in the early 1960's, when the civil rights movement was really starting to achieve things, there was a segregationist backlash. Things got ugly for blacks in the South...uglier, in fact, than they had been for decades. But this backlash wasn't a sustainable thing; it was the death-throes of an institution of racism that was fighting a futile rear-guard action against inevitable change.

I believe that what we are seeing today -- in the proposed Federal Marriage Act, in the various anti-gay marriage amendments at the state level, in the vicious and hateful rhetoric that chokes the airwaves and is preached at the pulpits of this nation -- are the death-throes of another institution: the institution of homophobia. In ten years time, I believe that people will look back on the '00s the same way that we now look back on the '60s: a time when the hatemongers were pitched out kicking and screaming all the way." -- Jessica L. Orsini