The video features photos from the Anti-Prop 8 Protest in Silver Lake I attended after its passing.

Buy "So Special" - All Proceeds to go to Equality California

UPDATED: I have changed the location where you can purchase the song.  Please refer to the updated blog post on this!

I have just released my “So Special” song on SnoCap. Because the song is about my take on marriage equality, I have decided that anything I make from it will go to Equality California (http://www.eqca.org) and the fight for marriage equality. Whether or not you like the song, it’s only 99-cents! So please help out this great cause by purchasing the song! You can catch the full-version of my song on my myspace, or just purchase below.

Lyrics Below:

So Special (cc.tran)

You can wrap your arms around me
I can give you a kiss
We can wear rings of gold
And declare to the world this is it
And anyone could say
That we were right or wrong
But we have the choice, we have the voice,
to say we belong

Chorus
But what makes us special?
What makes us more real -
Than other lovers in love
Just the same?
What makes us so special?
That people could hold claim
That others shouldn’t have it -
What so many throw away

Love one another
Words I abide
Golden rule
In a collective denied
I know that you love me
And that’s all I need
But we have the choice, we have the voice,
to say we belong

Chorus

Bridge
What if the tables were all turned around?
What if we’re the separate side of equal?
Our choice, our voice, was someone else’s sound?

Chorus

But we have the choice, we have the voice,
to say we belong

Thanks!

-cct

Obama Victory and California's Gay Marriage Ban

I’ve been feeling this odd back-and-forth pull in federal politics versus state level politics (in my particular case – California’s).  It seems as if – perhaps by chance – the progressive changes on the federal level is met by regressive issues on the state level.  Though this post is really only focused on one aspect of that – marriage equality.

On the same day that President Obama was elected as our first African-American president, Proposition 8 passed in California – defining that marriage is between a man and a woman, thereby putting the status of all the gay couples who had married in limbo.  Most recently, on the same day President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor as the potential first Hispanic Supreme Court judge, judges in California’s Supreme Court laid value to Prop 8 and its passing.

LATimes Front Page: Sonia Sotomayor and Gay Marriage Ban Upheld

While I don’t honestly feel that Prop 8 will stay a fixture for long – the court did, after all, keep the marriages valid between gay couples pre-Proposition 8 – it still saddens me to see progress be ironically regressive.

I’ve been talking lately with friends about the state of relationships in America.  We exist in a world where liberating sexual freedoms are a norm – where multiple partners, heterosexual commitments without marriage, 48-hour marriages, and children out of wedlock are just a part of life.  Some people might not approve of them, but law doesn’t discriminate against them.  Perhaps this stems from the fear of conversation, of dialogue, that people don’t want to face.  It’s okay – so long as we don’t recognize it.

Regardless, while we seem to be at least trying to judge less and less by the color of a person’s skin on a national level and a person’s actions on a social level, the fact that two people love each other and want to make a commitment is denounced because they are the same gender doesn’t reveal us to be a progressive society.  It reveals that we are still biased in matters that affect human beings within our fold.

Proposition 8 is a judgment call against a group of people.  If we wanted to make it at an adequate reflection of what this state and this nation is supposed to founded upon, then we should take away the right of marriage from everyone.  Logically, I understand the court could only do what it could with the voting of Proposition 8 (let’s  face it, California Constitution is also a mess!), but I am disappointed in the California voters that let it pass in the first place.

In the call of right and wrong, we don’t often enough strip away the complicated details to bring it down to heart of the matter – genderless, colorless.

Julian Bond once stated, “The lessons of the civil rights movement of yesterday … is that sometimes the simplest of ordinary everyday acts, of taking a seat on a bus, of sitting down at a lunch counter, of applying for a marriage license, sometimes these can have extraordinary consequences, can change our world.”  I’m a firm believer in this, because the most important question in this debate should have nothing to do with gender or color.

The question comes down to: should people have the right to marry? Answer that question without any clauses, any qualifiers because that is the heart of equal rights – in the simplicity, the everyday.  My answer?  Yes.

-cct

via Keli Goff: How the Crucifixion of Miss California Hurts the Marriage Equality Movement.

Talk about ideas!  Anyone up for it?  Suggestions?!!

via Gay Couples Line Up for Marriage Licenses in Iowa – NYTimes.com.