Why I Vote. Tuesday, Nov 3 , 2020 1:56 p.m

 

One June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed into law The Equal Pay Act of 1963. I was almost five months old.

 

On August 28, when I was one year and seven months old, The March on Washington occurred with the keynote speaker, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. giving his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

 

I was one year and ten months old when President Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

 

 I was three years old when in 1965, President Johnson signed The Voting Rights Act that halted efforts to keep minorities from voting. That same year the Supreme Court ruled on Griswold v. Connecticut, that struck down a law restricting access to contraception for married couples.

 

In 1967, when I was five-years-old, President Johnson amended Executive Order 11246, which dealt with affirmative action, to include sex discrimination on the list of prohibited employment discrimination.

 

 On April 4, 1968 Rev Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis at The Lorraine Hotel.

 

On June 28, 1968 when police tried to arrest gay patrons in New York City at the Stonewall Inn for simply being gay, the patrons rioted for three days.

 

In late summer 1968 I came to Georgia school for first grade while my dad went to Vietnam. I saw school and other social racial segregations for the first time in my life.

 

On November 22, 1971 when I was nine-years-old, the Supreme Court case Reed v. Reed declared sex discrimination a violation of the 14th Amendment.

 

When I was ten-years old in 1972, the senate approved the Equal Rights Amendment and it was sent to the states for ratification (to this day, it has not passed). That same year, the American Psychiatric Association finally agreed to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.

 

In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled on Roe Vs Wade, giving women, for the first time, the legal right to reproductive choice. I was eleven-years-old.

 

I was a senior in high school on October 14, 1979, when 75,000 people descended on Washington for a National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

 

In 1980, the year I graduated high school, Paula Hawkins of Florida, a Republican, became the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate without following her husband or father in the job.

When I was nineteen-years-old in 1981, the first woman Supreme Court Justice was confirmed. 

On June 26, 2015, when I was fifty-three years old, the United States Supreme Court ruled same sex marriage legal in all 50 states.

 

In 2017 when I was fifty-five-years-old, thousands of immigrant children, including infants, were separated from their parents by our government. To date, over 500 children have not been reunited with their families.  

 

I was fifty-eight-years-old when George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered by law enforcement officers.

I was fifty-eight-years-old when 231,477 Americans had been reported dead from Covid-19, a virus that our leadership failed to address. 

 

I vote so that we might protect the rights that women, blacks, and the LGBTQ community have fought so hard to obtain.

I vote for all Americans no matter the race, creed, age, sexual orientation, sexual identity, or religion.

I vote so that all Americans will have equal protection under the law.

I vote on the right side of history.

 I vote for unity and not division.

I vote for social justice.

I vote so that all Americans might have healthcare.

I vote so that education is equally funded for every child.

 

I vote Joe Biden because our country will not survive another four years of Donald J. Trump. We are standing on the precipice. This is our moment.

See you on the other side.