"US actor George Takei is to wed his long-term partner after California lifted its ban on same-sex marriage.
Takei, 71, best known for playing Mr Sulu in Star Trek, said he and Brad Altman were going through the "delicious dilemma" of where to marry.
"The actor and 54-year-old Mr Altman have been together for 21 years."
[For the full article, see here.]
The more celebrities take imminent advantage of the California Supreme Court's decision finally telling people that "separate is not equal," and that same-sex couples have to have the same marriage rights as do heterosexual couples, and that such constructs as Domestic Partnerships don't confer the equivalent dignity and rights to same-sex couples who seek to spend the rest of their lives together, the less likely it is that any ballot initiative in California (and, subsequently, elsewhere) will pass.
When people such as George Takei and Ellen DeGeneres take advantage of marriage rights, a lot of the wind will come out of the sails of a likely ballot initiative that will define marriage as consisting between one man and one woman; it will largely be the haters (in the name of "tradition" and "the Bible," of course) who will still have a fire in the belly to deny same-sex couples dignity and full and equal civil rights.
It would be wonderful if couples who have been married in Canada and who live in California would also take advantage of the Supreme Court's decision before any ballot initiative is brought before the voters.
Civil rights are not to be subject to the will of the masses. If that had been the case regarding African-Americans, and the U.S. Supreme Court had not been "activist" in intervening in that disgraceful part of American history, we would still have Jim Crow laws and segregation as social and political realities, and still been enshrined in the "Law of the Land."
Also, the more committed same-sex couples get married, particularly celebrities, the less likely that being "Gay" will be identified with pejorative labels such as "immoral," "hedonism," and "deviance," that the religious and political right wing have cynically used to feather their nests.
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