Thursday, November 06, 2008

The Gay Conspiracy

Just to poke a stick into things:

After discussions at work today, I am all fired up. The more I think about it the more I am angered: How can you annul someone's marraige with a vote?
It is bad enough that people feel that they can vote to disallow same sex unions. It's a whole giant leap backwards...
What supremely disturbs me about the whole thing is the fact that people who were already married, have had their marriages annulled. They, in essence, never existed. The vote cancels not only future marriages, but PAST ones. Vows at civil unions (not religious ones) that had already happened. I thought there was a separation of church and state? This is evidence to the contrary

This is so very wrong on so very many levels.

What if your community got together and told you they'd held a vote, and that you and your partner were deviants, not like them, and that your marriage was not real. That it had never happened. You're not allowed to be married to the person you love. And you should probably leave town too, as after all, you deviant, you don't live a socially acceptable relationship with the person you love...we won't allow you to, because it's easier to hate you when we can pretend you aren't like us.

Take any openly harsh statement against homosexuality and replace the sexual/gender references with racial ones. Go on...try it. If you said them at a pulpit or podium you would be strung out to dry and publicly condemned as a bigot and a racist. I'm not talking about agreeing to disagree, or your own private opinion...but public statements that inspire hatred and hate crimes on a regular daily basis. Grouping all homosexuals together as deviants or child molestors, out to corrupt your children and destroy your society. Do people honestly believe this stuff anymore?

Sadly, still, homosexual hatred and slander is still OK.
Why?
As for me, I just don't care, honestly, if you're gay or straight. It's a non-issue. Who you are, how you live your life and treat others is proof of your quality as an individual...that's it.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Even the Republican Governor of California campaigned for people NOT to vote for Prop 8 yet they still did. Go figure?

The religious angle is such a hypocritical excuse. Divorce is pushed as a much bigger sin in the Bible. To "put away your wife to take another is adultery" says Jesus an few times. "Do not commit adultery" is one of the Ten Commandments for crying out loud. Yet the church and society readily allow and accept divorce.

People have the need to be able to sit superior over someone, anyone else. Thus is born sexism, bigotry, racism, and gay bashing.

Give the gays a break. Like you said, who cares who he or she marries. But even today inter-racial couples are still treated differently, yet at least it is no longer against the law.

This government endorsed bigotry makes me shake my head.

Anonymous said...

"As for me, I just don't care, honestly, if you're gay or straight. It's a non-issue. Who you are, how you live your life and treat others is proof of your quality as an individual...that's it."

Hear hear. All that matters to me is that someone is a good person.

Peter T Chattaway said...

For what it's worth, some churches are more casual about divorce than others. So some churches are less "hypocritical" about homosexuality than others, as far as that goes.

Of course, it is not only gay couples that have to deal with prejudices and accusations of child molestation etc. Polygamous couples -- or, er, triples or quadruples, whatever you'd call them -- face a certain amount of prejudice too, in that regard. And, as it happens, many of the arguments for granting legal status to same-sex marriages would apply to polygamous relationships, too.

Not-so-hypothetical question: Were Obama's parents "married"? Should they ever have been regarded as such? They did have a wedding ceremony of some sort, I believe. But Obama's father was already married to someone else in Kenya, and he returned to her a few years later after he had finished his schooling in the United States. If the American or Hawaiian government had learned about this earlier marriage, should they have annulled the "marriage" between Obama's parents? (And considering that Obama's father was 24 and his mother was 17 when Obama was conceived, how would this play into the stereotype of polygamists exploiting minors, etc.? Granted, Obama's mother was of "legal" age in Hawaii when she met Obama's father, but in other states, like California -- home of Proposition 8 -- their relationship would have been considered statutory rape.)

Obama's father was Muslim, and Islam officially permits polygamy. Should Muslims who come to this country be told that their marriages don't exist any more? Should Canadian law, founded in at least nominally Judeo-Christian principles, insist on disregarding -- or, for that matter, prosecuting -- these second and third marriages?

Or should the government get out of the marriage business altogether? That is where my own sympathies lie, for whatever it's worth.

At any rate, the question is a whole lot bigger than simply deciding whether legally recognized same-sex relationships should be considered "marriages" or merely "civil unions".

Anonymous said...

...they are skirting the depth of the issue by simplifying it to Marraige VS civil union.

However Pete, I think comparing the cancellation of a polygymous marraige when moving into North America to the cancellation of a regular (gay) marraige carried out here is not the same thing. Pollygamy and homosexuality are not the same thing. It's a religious thing...Marrying one person because you love them is different.
Altho it can be religious or cultural as to why you choose to be polygymous. You don' t choose to be gay...

Peter T Chattaway said...

Well, marriage isn't necessarily about love, though love certainly helps. And if someone loves more than one woman, or more than one man, then who are we to say that he or she should not be allowed to marry them all? Polygamy, at the very least, has many, many precedents across space and time -- it appears on all continents, in all parts of history, and in many (though not all) cultures -- whereas "gay marriage" has no precedent whatsoever. Indeed, a number of gay activists are actually opposed to "gay marriage" because they think it is just another way of heterosexuals trying to impose "normal" standards of sexual behaviour on them. And certainly, conservatives like David Brooks have spoken out in favour of "gay marriage" precisely because gay couples would thus be expected to remain faithful and monogamous, etc. As he wrote a few years ago: "We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity."

Magnus said...

It isn't just religious people voting it down, I think. I figure a lot more people who say they are supportive of gay and lesbian marriages/rights just say so in public. When in private they aren't so supportive. I also think that works the other way and many vocal oppenents are privately for it.

elasticwaistbandlady said...

I would have voted YES on Prop 8 had it been up for vote in Texas. I would have been really, really, really conflicted about it, though because this is not a cut and dry issue like many supporters feel it is.

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