Happy Passover: Let My People Marry!

It is fitting that on the first day of Passover — a holiday on which Jews all over the world celebrate freedom — the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments on this generation’s most critical and high-profile civil rights issue: marriage equality.  While the fate of this particular decision is in doubt, demographic surveys clearly demonstrate that it is only a matter of time before same-sex marriage is legally sanctioned across the nation.

(Here’s my endorsement of marriage equality — two years old, but still very timely.)

Today, we are also reminded by the continued staying power of Mark Twain’s famous statement that Kentucky is always twenty years behind the rest of the country.  It was a close call, but it appears that the Kentucky General Assembly will ignore popular sentiment and override Governor Steve Beshear’s courageous veto of legislation that threatens anti-discrimination laws passed by several Kentucky cities to protect the civil rights of the LGBT community.  We can only pray that the bill — regretfully styled as a “religious freedom” effort — simply represents the last throes of an anti-freedom insurgency that will be thoroughly quashed when our younger generations take power, wielding their commitment to tolerance, compassion and the universal value of loving our neighbors as ourselves.

And so I remind my freedom-loving, equal rights-embracing friends, be they Democrats, Republicans or Independents — that time is on our side.  The Pharoah-ic force that continues to push against, in King’s words, “the arc of the moral universe… [that] bends toward justice,” will some day be forced to let our people go.