A Personal Reflection on the Long Road to Full Civil Rights

This long weekend, as we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., many carry into it a deep bitterness and resentment that the very voting rights for which Dr. King and the late John Lewis fought will not be renewed and protected. To come this close but to fall short because of unified Republican resistance and two hold-out—some would say sell-out—Democrats in the Senate is beyond disheartening.

It’s tempting to look upon this and throw up our hands in despair, but I personally shall not. I know, on a deeply personal level, what the path to full equality and dignity in this country is. It is not an easy, straight highway heading off into the sunset. It is more a winding mountain road, one that doubles back maddeningly every few turns, as those who walk it trudge toward a seemingly elusive summit.

When my Ba first arrived in the United States, there were statutes in many states that forbade him from intermarrying with any white Americans. It took the Supreme Court decision of Loving v. Virginia in 1967, one year before I was born, to finally end anti-miscegenation laws. Growing up, I learned about how he and Ma were finally permitted to immigrate here after the Chinese Exclusion Act finally was repealed in 1943. China had become an important ally of the U.S. in the war in the Pacific against Japan, and it was increasingly politically embarrassing, and on its face contrary to our stated values as a nation, to have singled out Chinese for non-entry, the only race ever to have been so specifically targeted. 

When I was 10, Ba showed me the deed to our property of our house in Arizona which contained a racially restrictive covenant. It forbade sale to any “negroids” or “mongoloids”—which after a moment I realized meant us. My father was proud to own that house and possess the deed despite the clause, which was finally ruled unenforceable by the Supreme Court and then expressly forbidden by the civil rights era Fair Housing Act of 1968.

When I was 15, just as I was first coming to terms with being gay, the Supreme Court told me and millions of other LGBTQ+ people that our love could be criminalized, even in the privacy of our own homes, in the shattering case of Bowers v. Hardwick. That hate-filled opinion also served as a legal basis for continuing to exclude people like me from military service; after all, if our “behavior” was criminal, why couldn’t the military keep us out? And when we finally elected a president, Bill Clinton, who said he understood our struggle and would fight for us, what we got instead was “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act, which Clinton signed into law in 1996.

I know what betrayal feels like.

When I was 26, I fought the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in the federal courts and took the case up to the Ninth Circuit, where we lost two to one, an old, straight white judge more concerned about the privacy in the showers than the constitutional rights of LGBT service members. The experience soured me so badly toward the “law” that I stopped practicing for many years. 

When the California Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had a fundamental right to marry in the summer of 2008, some of my friends rushed to marry, only to have the voters of California pass Proposition 8 five months later, enshrining discrimination against LGBTQ+ people into the state constitution by banning same-sex marriage. I learned that it isn’t always the case that democracy and the will of the people result in a fair and just outcome.

The courts, the president, the Congress and even the people can break your heart.

Today, both gay sex and marriage equality are protected rights, but as we saw just this year with abortion rights, we cannot let our guard down for a moment. A shift in the political winds, a seat or two on the Supreme Court, and we might very well tumble backward by forty, even fifty years. 

And so it is with voting rights. White politicians seeking to retain their racial and political supremacy have worked to deny the fundamental right to vote for Black and other minority voters since the birth of the Republic. There was a time in Mississippi, because of systemic voter suppression, when African American voter registration rates were just three percent, in a state with the largest percentage of Black residents in the union. Registering to vote or casting a ballot while Black in such times carried with it the risk of violence or even death. 

Since then we have made great strides, especially with the help of modern heroes like Stacey Abrams, but the backlash always comes. In all likelihood, next week we will not pass either the Freedom to Vote Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act through this senate, tilted as it is already toward smaller, white, rural states and broken as it is by archaic rules like the filibuster, which has historically been used to halt civil rights at every turn. 

But it would be a mistake to despair and surrender now, right as we find ourselves in a pivotal election year. We have a real chance to render irrelevant the two Democratic holdouts by adding to our senate majority, but to get there we must rally from this low place and win elections in key swing districts and states.

The top of the mountain always seems so very far away, especially when the road has doubled back and is taking us back down into deep and confusing forests. I have walked through many of these long, dark vales on the path to full equality. But as with all fights worth fighting for, all struggles worth enduring, I also know the best and only way through. 

Our heads must lift up, our hearts full of resolve, our eyes on the prize.