What blocks gay equality is prejudice. What fuels the movement for gay equality is the conviction that this prejudice is not constitutionally protect… - Michael Nava

[Padre Cáceres, to Miguel Sarmiento] "Poor people are not simply a set of diseases or potential diseases, Señor Doctor. They are human souls. If you wish to change their habits, you must learn what those habits are and why they have acquired them. You must meet the people."

Sarmiento waited for Luis at a sidewalk table at the Cafe Colón on the Reforma. Two sumptuous carriages filled with beautifully dressed women passed beneath Columbus's monument. They were the advance guard of the daily procession of the rich that wound its way up the boulevard and around Chapultepec in a stately and pointless show of opulence. Meanwhile, ragged Indian men swept the sidewalks with branch-and-twig brooms, bent over at their labour and ignored by the passers-by. The distance between the silk women and the pauper Indians was the true history of México, Sarmiento thought.

In a pluralist society, people act according to their own views of right and wrong, except where their actions violate agreed-upon criminal codes. This moral diversity is precisely what the religious right objects to; rather than seek to persuade nonbelievers of its version of the truth, it would simply impose that version on them. Religion enjoys freedom, not a licence to interfere with other people's freedom. The religious right's complaint that Christian values have been left out of public discourse reveals either a basic misunderstanding of our constitutional system or an equally basic disregard for its principles and workings. Religious-based values are not banned from the public arena, but they are not vested with any greater moral force than competing viewpoints, nor are they exempt from rational examination simply because they originate in someone's notion of the divine. The religious origin of opinion does not, in our system, give the opinion any special status in public debate. In a contest between individual freedom and particular religious views, individual freedom must be preferred because it and its corollary, equal protection of the laws, are what the American constitutional system holds sacred. Scriptural views are not exempt from dispute and have no special status within our constitutional framework.