The Fierce Irony of Now

Did anyone else catch the supreme irony of people in CA and FL (in particular, but also AZ) voting to elect our first black president thereby shattering the legacy of jim crow and fully recognizing the scope of civil rights in this country, only to have some of those very same voters acting to take away civil rights from gay couples through ballot initiatives all over the country?

It's absurd and sad, really, that in breaking one barrier we simply erect others in its place. It is clearly not the pressing issue that the economy is for some voters, and yet some individuals felt the need to make that civil rights/social issue central to their election process. Don't we have more important things to deal with than spending millions of dollars overturning the California Supreme Court decision that granted the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples?

Apparently for some, the need to interfere with, and regulate, private conduct (despite its philosophical inconsistency with the Republican platform of minimizing government intrusion) has not gone away.

Civil rights leaders frequently reference Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words for action to expand civil rights: "the fierce urgency of now," meaning the imperative to recognize immediately the hypocrisy of failing to extend basic civil rights to all Americans (indeed, all people).