California, Hang Your Head In Shame

Fear, hatred, ignorance. I wonder if there was exit polling to show which of these three was issue number one to the supporters of Proposition 8?

Fear - the fear that somehow, allowing homosexuals the same rights and privileges and benefits of marriage will destroy your own holy unions. Fear of the unknown, since no one - NO ONE - has been able to explain how this would occur. This in a land where television game shows entertain us with contests to select a bride from a pool of competing bimbos. This in a state where celebrities marry and divorce and remarry and cheat and join in consenting multiple relationships for amusement or enjoyment or advancement or just because they are bored. Yet somehow, if the two people involved happen to have the same type of genitalia, civilization as we know it is at the brink of collapse. Better to prohibit these freaks from the rights of every other resident than to risk that.

What are you afraid of? Is your own sexuality that fragile that allowing Adam and Steve to have a marriage license tempts you to fellate the first man who will let you unzip his pants? Are your own bonds so weak that the lure of the lesbians will steal your wife away? Are your children so poorly raised and so confused that the mere idea of illicit bathroom sex will rob them of the Ozzie and Harriet life you have planned for them? Here's a clue for you: there IS no homosexual agenda. Gays want to connect and marry (or not) with others of their own gender because that is to whom they are attracted. Period. It is no more complicated or sinister than that. Your straight son is more likely to be seduced into a life of depravity by a female scoundrel than a male. Your straight daughter is no less likely to find her soul mate in another woman than a gay woman is to find hers in a man. Get over it. There is nothing to be worried about. Except, perhaps, your secretly gay child suffering in a life of self-loathing and misery at being the unknown target of your hate.

Hatred - yes, admit it. When you see the footage of two men at the alter, gazing into each others' teary eyes, kissing, exchanging vows of love and fidelity, your stomach turns. They are different. They are doing something that you would never, ever do - or if you did, you would hate yourself for it. The same feeling that members of the KKK feel when seeing a black man looking at - or God forbid, touching - a white woman. The same feeling that the Nazis felt when they saw a young man in a yarmulke walking free on the streets. Their mere existence makes you angry, uncomfortable, enraged. It isn't what they do, which has no actual effect on you at all. It is simply that they are. You may deny it, but you know it to be true. Go look at a gay couple somewhere. Notice the pit of your stomach when they hold hands. That feeling is hatred. Enjoy it.

Ignorance - gullible people filled with fear and hate who want to be fooled into justification. Lazy, uncaring people too wrapped up in themselves to question the pap being fed to them. Do you honestly believe it possible to be "separate but equal?" Did you believe the lie that California's civil unions and protected rights are "just as good?" Or perhaps you believed that they are "good enough" for those people.

It simply isn't true. Arkansas has just passed a ban on unmarried couples adopting, the purpose of which bill they gleefully bragged was to keep homos from getting their hands on children. It says nothing about couples with civil unions. And people move. We are a mobile society. And while state benefits may be protected, federal benefits are denied. Separate is not equal.

Listen: even if the exact same water comes from both fountains, having both and replacing the "Whites Only" and "Coloreds Only" signs with "Straights Only" and "Queers Only" is offensive and discriminatory.

Once you have categorized a group by law to be somehow different, you have instantly made them less. Less than Americans, less than Humans. This may be exactly what the fundamentalist theocratic whack-jobs want, but I shudder to think that it is truly a majority view. And even if it is, one of the central tenants of American Democracy is the protection of the rights of the minority from the tyranny of the majority. In the end, each one of us is a minority of one. Abandon that ideal, and we are all at risk.

Like every other heterosexual person in America, my own marriage and my own children are completely unaffected by the marital status of homosexual couples. And yet, the prohibition against gay marriage diminishes us all. In addition to creating a subclass of Americans with a lower legal standing than "real" Americans, this ban represents the death of Freedom of Religion in America.

Face it: the only reason - the ONLY justification - for creating this class of disenfranchised individuals is that God has labeled them unnatural, abominable sinners. Or rather, some believers in a particular manifestation of God have thus labeled them. Others may believe in a God who celebrates all loving relationships. Others don't believe in God at all, and wish that we weren't forced to obey the doctrines of those who do. But now, in California, all are compelled by law to follow a single dogma.

While believers in the gay-hating God may think they have gained a victory, they have lost as much as anyone. Because the separation of Church and State was never meant to inhibit religion - it was and is meant to protect it. For all of us.

So hang your heads, Californians. You have enshrined bigotry and intolerance into law, the first amendment ever to deny rights to a group of Americans and dictate religious persecution. You've accomplished with the ballot what terrorists with bombs and box-cutters could not. Your underlying weapons, though, were the same - fear, hatred, and ignorance. No doubt the Taliban is cheering your alignment with their fundamental fanaticism. On the day that America made a historic step forward, California has taken a shameful step back.