I’m just horrified at people. The anti-gay rhetoric and legislation is heating up like crazy — and my choice of words there is deliberate.
This is an insane religious war we’re in, and it disgusts me. No one can come up with a single argument against same-sex marriage without injecting religious beliefs into it; which defeats the argument. Congress can make no law based on religious beliefs. In the eyes of the law, each person (should be) equal.
Look around you: what’s so sacred about marriage? And by allowing more people to marry, how is that harmful to marriage? Isn’t it more harmful to let Britney Spears promote it?
I just can’t find the words to explain how I feel about all these insane fundamentalists who have taken over our nation. While we’re engaged in “freeing” people from the fundamentalist theocracies of the middle east, we’re in the process of creating a new one here.
When the fundamentalists are forced into a corner, they trot out the idea that gay people choose to be gay and that it’s a lifestyle choice. And I could sit here and explain until my face turns blue that I never chose to be gay… who the hell would make that choice when it means that the religious establishment wants to find ways to wipe you off the face of the earth? Hey, straight people — do you recall a time when you made a choice to be heterosexual?
Can someone please tell me, without referring to their faith or beliefs, or what their God has “said”, in purely secular terms, why homosexuality is evil and why two adults committing themselves to a monogamous lifetime relationship is harmful to marriage? Why in the world should the government grant special benefits to one group of people? After all, isn’t it “special rights” that the anti-gay nuts are always screaming about?
And then, can you explain to me why you believe it’s time to enshrine bigotry and discrimination into law? Is that what you think the Constitution is about?
It’s so sad to see that prejudice, bigotry, and hatred of differences is alive and well in the United States.
Earlier today, in a live internet discussion from the Washington Post, Evan Wolfson of Freedom to Marry had some eloquent things to say. It’s unfortunate that reasoned and logical discourse has no sway over people who are driven by religious fervor and hate.
Governor Mitt Romney and others who are criticizing the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to end sex discrimination in marriage echo the vociferous opposition when another state supreme court became the first to strike down race discrimination in marriage — also by a 4-3 vote. Each person seeking a license to marry the “wrong” kind of person, the California Supreme Court wrote in 1948, “finds himself barred by law from marrying the person of his choice and that person to him may be irreplaceable. Human beings are bereft of worth and dignity by a doctrine that would make them as interchangeable as trains.”
The 4-3 majority in that historic case, Perez v. Sharp, like the Massachusetts high court today, correctly rejected assertions by the opponents of equality that in such matters, courts should defer to public opinion or yield to a long and sorry history of discrimination. By upholding the constitution’s command of equality and respecting the families and loving unions formed by Americans in a vulnerable minority, the court fulfilled the mission of the judiciary, did justice, and immeasurably enriched the nation.
Gov. Romney gives no good reason for denying same sex-couples what the California Supreme Court called “the essence of the right to marry — the freedom to join in marriage with the person of one’s choice.” He never explains how denying committed gay couples marriage licenses “defends” anyone else’s marriage, helps their families, or builds stronger communities. Instead, he invites a massive and divisive political campaign of resistance, much like governors George Wallace and Orval Faubus, who have gone down in history as on the wrong side of America’s movement toward equality and respect for the pursuit of happiness. Gov. Romney and politicians around the country would do our nation a favor if they would stop playing with fire near the constitution, stop making America a house divided, stop trying to intimidate the courts who are doing their vital jobs, and stop standing in the doorway trying to block loving couples from crossing the threshold.
It’s worth noting that the Massachusetts constitution was written by non other than John Adams. Although there were certainly homosexual people in Massachusetts hundreds of years ago, I doubt that he even gave them a thought. His document encompassed humanity as a whole, without regard for the diversity of man.
