Get off my TV, Senator Ted Cruz

I just watched an interview on FOX with Sen. Ted Cruz about the fundamental wrongness of gay marriage. Despite what the people of this land have voted into the law, Sen. Cruz is a supporter to Kim Davis, the now infamous Kentucky clerk who is jailed for her refusal to issue gay marriage licences regardless of legality, citing the Constitution. 

Without going on a rant about how people in public office are supposed to uphold the law, because we all know those lines are blurred as much now as they were then, I think it’s best to remind them that this country is not the country it was when our forefathers wrote the Constitution in 1787. 

The Constitution had its first 10 amendments in 1791, the Bill of Rights. In 2015, there are now an additional 15 of them—proof that things have changed as society has progressed. There were 13 states back then, not the 50 we have today, and the country was still two years away from electing George Washington as its first-ever president.

When the Constitution was signed, the men who wrote it wore those silly white wigs. They wore clothes we wouldn’t see at the grocery store or mall today. We would chuckle if we did, I’m sure. 

They arrived to the Philadelphia Convention to sign the Constitution by horse and carriage, not by car. They worked at night by candlelight, not by the flick of a switch. They knocked on each other’s doors when they needed to talk; not by phone, email or social media. Samuel Morse wouldn’t even invent the telegraph for nearly 100 years.

When the Constitution was created slavery was legal, and blacks had no right to declare themselves citizens. Today, a black man sits in the most powerful position in the country. I wonder what George Washington would think about that.

Back then, people were condemned in public regularly as a spectator sport at the drop of a hat. The West was certainly still wild. The country wouldn't see their first multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, or the world's first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, for over a century.

Back then, welfare didn’t exist. It was each man for himself. Women didn’t vote. They rarely had a job. Healthcare for citizens was a distant conversation. It wouldn’t be until 1954 that Dr. Joseph E. Murray would perform the first successful kidney transplant. I’m sure many people in 1787 would tell you it was impossible to do so. Man had yet to fly. We certainly hadn’t gone to the moon. 

Back then, a woman was ready to wed and start a family at the age of our middle-schoolers today. Statutory rape wasn’t even a concept to the men they often married. Jared from Subway wouldn't have been jailed for relations with a minor. Marriages were arranged by families, and personal choice was not often a consideration.

Gay marriage wasn’t even on the radar. Procreation and lineage were important to the survival of the country and to a family tree. Most people wouldn’t consider not finding a person of the opposite sex to create their legacy with because that’s what you were “supposed to do.”

Sperm banks didn’t exist. Artificial insemination was in its infancy. Scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani had only just performed the first successful artificial insemination on a dog three years before the Constitution was signed. The procedure in humans wouldn’t come for almost a century. Today, people have options.

With 319 million people in the U.S., the possibility of our country not surviving is minimal, except for us destroying ourselves with the technology we’ve developed since the birth of the Constitution. At the time, flintlock on guns had just been introduced - automatic or nuclear weapons...forget about it. Our forefathers had no idea of the progression to come.

So I say to you Sen. Cruz and Kim Davis: referring to the Constitution as “proof” that gay marriage is fundamentally wrong and “illegal” under its words is bogus. You are living in the past. The future is now. The people have spoken in the same way our forefathers did. If you insist that we must live as our forefathers did then get off the TVs, which didn’t exist back then, put on your silly white wigs, sell your car and buy a horse, and relinquish your use of electricity. Go out and pound the pavement with your words like our forefathers did - oh wait, there wasn’t pavement back then either. Get off my TV, I’m living in 2015, you are not.