In 1786, Pennsylvania became the first of the 13 colonies to lessen the penalty for sodomy. If you are thinking to yourself that some archaic laws against sodomy in colonial America were probably pretty stiff, you're absolutely right. Death. Until it was lessened to a paltry 10 years in prison, the punishment for sodomy was execution. South Carolina, a particularly sore spot in American civil rights history, did not remove the death penalty for sodomy until 1873, nearly one hundred years later.
Today's battle for equal rights for sexual minorities has progressed in many ways, but we aren't there quite yet. A small headline caught my eye today, pointing out a bill in California that would make May 22 "Harvey Milk Day," a statewide day of "significance" that would be celebrated, but not as a holiday. Can you hear the feathers begin to ruffle on the social conservatives as the thought hits them? I can. I can also anticipate the squawking that inevitably follows. 'We won't have a gay holiday,' they'll say, right before invoking the thought of children learning about homosexuality in schools. Which is a shame, because I'm willing to bet that most kids who have written essays about Martin Luther King Jr. and Susan B. Anthony have never heard of Harvey Milk, the Stonewall riots, or Mathew Shepard.
Eager not to disappoint me, a group called SaveCalifornia.com has stepped up to bash the bill and its proponents. Its news release, despicably titled "SB 572 Making schoolchildren honor the notorious Harvey Milk and his 'LGBT' agenda passes California Legislature," is rife with hyperbole, hateful rhetoric, and generally misleading notions. I confess to have not read the full release myself. I was too sickened to finish.
The bill deserves Governor Schwarzenegger's stamp of approval. Here's to hoping he does not defer it as he did to a similar bill last year. Harvey Milk was an inspirational leader to a minority with few figureheads--it was and is risky for those with power to come out, as Milk's martyrdom proved. He worked diligently and progressively for GLBTQ rights. After three failed bids, he was the first openly gay man elected to office in California, as a San Francisco supervisor. He fought against Proposition 6, which would have mandated that all gay teachers and state workers be fired. Fear and hatred almost passed this bill that President Ronald Reagan felt infringed on individual rights.
Conservatives should be following the suit of Reagan, their modern-day icon, and continue to protect individual liberty and defend the rights of our GLBTQ brothers and sisters. However, social conservatism too often falls into the shadow of Dan White, the "family values" man that put 5 hollow-tip bullets into Harvey Milk after killing the S.F. mayor, a supporter of Milk and the gay community. The unrelated desire to preserve the heterosexual family unit drives many Americans to fear, detest, repress, harass, and assault sexual minorities, and in so doing, deny them equal protection under the laws of the United States.
Milk's legacy is an important for those who struggle with their own sexual identity. President Obama, although dubiously silent on gay rights, recognized Milk's importance to civil rights, posthumously granting him the Presidential Medal of Freedom last month. The film "Milk" was released late in 2008, starring a brilliant Sean Penn as Harvey. Eloquently empathetic, the film brought to life a civil rights story left out of history lessons.
If you have a chance to read Milk's Hope Speech, you should. I'll end this article with the hope that May 22, 2010 will be the first Harvey Milk Day in California and this, an excerpt from the screenplay of the recent film:
"I ask this... If there should be an assassination, I would hope that five, ten, one hundred, a thousand would rise. I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out - - If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door... And that's all. I ask for the movement to continue. Because it's not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power... it's about the "us's" out there. Not only gays, but the Blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us's. Without hope, the us's give up - I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. So you, and you, and you... You gotta give em' hope... you gotta give em' hope."
