The Bell Curve:

Many years ago when Cesar Chavez and his followers were leading demonstrations all across California for decent wages and working conditions for farm workers, an old friend of war days and journalism battles called me from Laguna Beach to join him and the protesters there. When my response was a long, long, long pause, he said: “That’s not your style, is it?”

It wasn’t. Much as I supported the farm workers, I didn’t go. Instead, I wrote a magazine article extolling Chavez and his cause.

I thought about that last week when, with a pack of theatergoers, I twice passed among a group of protesters with their signs demanding social justice for gay people who are denied the right to marry by the passage of Proposition 8.

As with the protesting farm workers, I believed in the cause, but it wasn’t my style to join them. Instead, here are my placards, offered from the comfort of an office chair.

In the post-election fervor of acrimony over the victory of Proposition 8, the only relevant argument for reversing its passage has mostly been lost for both winners and losers in the noisy curbside demonstrations.

This was well illustrated in two commentaries on the Pilot’s editorial page Sunday, one a reasoned factual defense of the Mormon Church, which is accused of underwriting — both morally and financially — the passage of Proposition 8, the other preempting the high ground of morality to accuse the protesters of trying to create a “super class” for homosexuals “threatening to take away the rights of Americans.”

The second is easier to counter because it so blatantly segregates an identifiable group of Americans to be denied basic citizen rights on highly divisive moral grounds.

We’ve been gradually growing out of this sort of discrimination for two centuries. Same-sex marriage is simply the most recent step in this progression.

A little history illuminated the key issue of Proposition 8 for me. So maybe you’d like to join me in a brief walk through the high points.

It was less than 100 years ago — Aug. 26, 1920 — that women were granted the vote in the United States.