- This week our country took a giant step forward with the Supreme Court striking down DOMA and rejecting the appeal of Prop. 8 proponents.
- But the high court also took a side step in the University of Texas case, not striking down affirmative action in public education, but imposing overly stringent standards that will make it next to impossible to consider race as one of many factors in college admissions.
- And the court took a heartbreaking, sorrowful step backwards in striking the voting rights law that requires states that have a history and continuing practice of erecting barriers to voting to obtain preapproval to changes in their election procedures.
- As Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom said this morning, progress does not occur in a straight line; it is elliptical.
- And as Martin Luther King declared, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
- But as we all know, it doesn’t bend by itself. We are the ones who bend it.
- We have to take the torch handed to us and continue to bend toward justice.
- Because of the courage of our forbears and our many heroes and sheroes of today’s unrelenting fight to bring justice and equal rights to all, we can rejoice that marriage in California is a right for all of us. This is an extraordinary victory. So I am very happy today.
- But the battle continues as we fight for marriage equality throughout our country in every state, as we fight to remedy the legacy of slavery and legal discrimination and provide equal educational opportunity for people of color, the poor and women, as we fight to protect the right to vote which is at the very heart of our democracy.
- August 16, 2023
CONTACT mediainquiries@oaklandcityattorney.org Oakland, Calif. – Today Oakland City Attorney Barbara J. Parker announced that this ...
