In case you haven’t heard, California voters chose to take away same-sex couple’s right to legally marry – a right that they’ve had given to them and taken away several times. [READ] While Governor Swarzenegger says that he’s hoping the courts will overturn this referendum decision, I think it was ridiculous that this went to a vote in the first place.

Human rights get awarded to persecuted groups precisely because rights enjoyed by the majority of a population in a given jurisdiction are not voluntarily extended to them. In cases like this, literal democracy doesn’t work. Think about the other human rights fights we’ve seen in the last century – equal rights for African Americans? Equal rights for women? Equal rights for minorities? Those were all great steps forward. There were opponents to this progress but looking back, few people would argue that we didn’t do the right thing.

The right thing to do in California (and the rest of the US, for that matter) is to immediately draft legislation legalizing same-sex marriage. You can’t count on the majority of people to do the right thing in an anonymous vote. In that situation, it’s too easy to let bigotry drive our decisions. That’s a decision that shouldn’t be in the hands of the masses.