March 28, 2011 06:36 PM UTC

To the members of the House Judiciary Committee - the time has come

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• by: allyncooper

(Goldwater and Reagan would have agreed. – promoted by MADCO)

SB 172 is now before your committee for consideration to the Committee of the Whole.  As you well know, SB 172 would provide in statue authorization permitting two unmarried adults to enter into a civil union.

There are those well-meaning fellow Coloradans among us who say the time is not right for this bill.  They say given the current economic conditions, when our unemployment rate is now at 9.3%, and the state continues to have serious budget problems and faced with draconian cuts in services and aid to education, we need to put this bill on the shelf and perhaps revisit it in the future.

To those who say the time is not now to enact SB172 into law to ensure the basic civil rights of all Coloradans to live their lives as they wish and responsibly provide for the means to do so, then when?  Shall we postpone the granting of legal process and  protection to all of our citizens until the unemployment rate is 5%, or until the housing crisis is over, or until the Legislature doesn’t have to deal with a billion dollar deficit every session?  Just what shall be the criteria? Such reasoning is disingenuous and illogical, because the denial of the civil rights of any of our citizens cannot be subrogated to the economy or any other extraneous issue.

On April 16, 1963 Martin Luther King sat in a Birmingham jail and penned a letter to fellow clergymen who had criticized his activities of ending discrimination in that city as “unwise and untimely”. He was questioned why he had chosen that time and place, why he just didn’t back off and wait because discrimination and segregation would eventually be recognized for the wrongs they were.  Martin Luther King’s response was simple and direct – “I am here in Birmingham because injustice is here”.  

King went on to say in his letter “For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice delayed is justice denied”.

Martin Luther King knew the time had come.

In the first two years of his presidency,  John F. Kennedy cautiously tread a fine line between tepid support of civil rights and appeasing the segregationist Democratic  legislators in Congress whose support was essential to passage of his legislation.

But by the spring of 1963, with Martin Luther King jailed and the consequences of that justice delayed and denied becoming more pronounced with the murders,  beatings,  and bombings, Kennedy addressed the nation on June 11, 1963 on television.

“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution”.  Kennedy went on to say the injustice and the discrimination of the Negro could no longer be tolerated and that “the nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. Now, the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise”.

A day after Kennedy’s speech, civil rights activist Medgar Evers, a veteran of the D -Day invasion at Normandy, was shot in the back and killed in front of his wife and children.  On June 19, 1963 Kennedy submitted to Congress the most far reaching civil rights bill in the nation’s history.

John F. Kennedy did not live to see this nation fulfill its promise, but he knew the time had come.

I happen to be heterosexual, and I believe that’s the way my Creator made me. Just as I believe the Creator made some of my fellow human beings a different sexual orientation, or a different race. And who am I to question that? Do I know better than my Creator?  My sexual orientation should be of no more concern to you than yours’ is to me or anybody else.  We are all children of God, and we all have a right to be here and live our lives with those we love and care for and choose to call our family with equal protection under the law.  This is the fundamental essence of our society that binds us together as one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.

At the 1948 Democratic Convention, Hubert Humphrey passionately argued for a strong civil rights plank proclaiming  “the time has come…..to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights”.  Colorado is blessed with abundant sunshine, and the time has come to make it even brighter by recognizing the human rights of all our citizens.

Members of the Committee, I urge you to favorably act on SB 172 for consideration by the Committee of the Whole.

Because the time has come.