Marriage Rights

It has begun. Worldwide, the shift in cultural views on same sex marriage is happening. South Africa just became the fifth nation to offer its gay and lesbian citizens full civil rights.
Sometimes, we get drunk and sated on history, and think that everything has already happend, passed, come to its fulfilment. Nothing new under the sun. History is dead.
Hear that? Brothers and sisters, that is the drumbeat of history.
In North America, Canada offers marriage rights.
The United States, the country of my birth, is fouling itself to rush backwards against the change of history, and write as much discrimination into law as it can, before history catches up.
Plenty of people fought the ending of slavery, hanging on by their fingernails to the system that kept them in power and kept discrimination enshrined.
Who speaks openly, positively of slavery today?
Women have the right to vote. Is anyone working to take it back from them?
We're in a spasm of reactionary politics. It will get uglier before it clears. It always does.
But I think it inevitable that the US will wake up, perhaps long after the rest of the world, and look back with shame upon the current discrimination.
History is already being written.