Letters to the Editor
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Gay marriage is not gonna happen
Sorry, gay lobby. Not gonna happen. If gay activists had settled for civil unions, Kerry would now be president. But the wack SF mayor Gavin Newsome had to do that idiotic and illegal stunt of marrying hundreds of gays in fake pretend marriages, and that really pissed off the social conservatives. That led to the OH marriage initiative, which brought out the conservawhacks, and that provided the margin for Bush.
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Civil Unions for All
I've never understood the gay marriage debate. One side masks their anxiety over and discomfort with the idea of gay sex by hiding behind religious "convictions." The other side makes shallow comparisons to the separate but equal institutions of the segregation era. Both are utterly ridiculous.
I don't believe in state sanctioned gay marriage. I don't believe in state sanctioned heterosexual marriage. The state has no business deciding who can participate in what is essentially a religious rite. Civil unions for all. Equality for all under law. Let individual churches decide whom to marry. How's that for equal?
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Gay Marriage? Not Yet.
Of course, gay marriage is going to happen. But not for quite a while yet. The general populace simply isn't there yet. But it will happen. Eventually. Read the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Personally, I'm with the writer who advocates civil unions for all, getting the state out of the marriage business and leaving that to the individual churches to decide. BUT, as long as we do have state sanctioned marriage in America, our constitution demands that it be offered to all. And eventually it will be.
As a political refugee, living in Spain where gay marriage is legal and gays have been serving openly in the military almost since the end of the Franco regime, I can say from personal experience that extending the same benefits to all citizens is not the end of life as we know it . . . in fact, if anything it has made Spanish life even more vital.
$0.02
- Stuart Laird
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Ah going along with injustice.
Much of this is in reponse to the last guy, but also to the general attitude of the Democrats. I think anyone who is themselves gay, or has had gay friends and acquantainces (I say this because many people opposed to gay marraige are, in general, uncomfortable with homosexuality because it is so foreign to them) understand the huge need to shift cultural attitudes. In much of the country (including where I grew up) being gay is viewed as hateful. Usually not so openly, but on the schoolyard, from peoples parents etc..., it is not acceptable behavior for a young person because it does not conform to a very limited sense of normalcy. Often this is just a matter of the fear of the unknown than the outright hate practiced by fundamentalists, a typical thing to say on the issue: "well I don't care what they do, I don't want to know about it." Well as anyone who ever grew up in a suburb and was just a bit different, more artistic for instance knows, its just borderline hell and then somehow you get out, and wonder over that miracle of how you found your way to college or a city, but at least in that situation maybe you have a supportive teacher, or a couple friends with similar feelings to mitigate that pain. Now imagine being all alone in that enviroment and you are beginning to suspect you are something completely unnacceptable to those around you and have been raised to think is completely unnacceptable. That is an unjust situation. To impose that type of split-self on a person going through puberty is great cruelty. Not to say life isn't hard and you wouldn't learn lessons from that, but no one deserves that type of treatment and childhood. So how do you change that, well homosexuality, something we've always had as a race, needs to become an across the boards acceptable form of behavior, the cultural attitudes need to change. And as long as legally that type of love remains different or orther from "normal" love, no one has the imperative to rethink things. Normalizing it as normal marriage would make great strides in changing cultural attititudes. The tricky part is obvious. Us in the cities and liberal areas who accept homosexuality imposing our idea on those in conservative areas. Which inevitably is us saying, hey red states we are smarter and more educated than you, now grow the hell up. As we know from conservative rhetoric that behavior creates resentment, making it politically problematic. So its a big question, i.e. what right to we have to impose our viewpoint, no matter how right we think it is on them. And vice versa, they impose there attitudes about not having gay marraige on us, and they say they are more righteous and holy than us. So reason and justice or religion and normalcy? Enlightenment values or middle ages? Those attitudes are hugely different and its hard to find a common ground (sorry Obama). But at the end of the day, central to those enlightenment values of justice, written into the constitution itself, is the ability of law to protect the rights of the minority from the will of the majority. Gay marraige is the issue this construction was created for, and being the post-enlightenment country we are, I think anyone who feels that pull accepts the imperative of protecting rights. what do you do, hurt the chances of election to do something you know is right, or corrupt yourself, able to do more good later. Its an impossible option, developed out of the impossible politics of trying to find a bridge between one side of the country who believes in reason and justice, and the other who believes in faith and morality.
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sorry, dataguyx...
This is not that cabal known as the 'gay lobby' (the ones trying to force that Gay Agenda on everyone). Nor is it San Francisco. Marriage was not on any major gay organizational agenda before 1995 or so, when it was discovered as a remarkably effective boogeyman by religious conservatives. (Some of us remember the first time we heard from televised pulpits of the 'Gays and their activist judge friends who want to force us to have their gay weddings here.') Personally, as a communications director for a congressional candidate in '96, I had to sit down with the candidate and the lesbian campaign manager and come up with a gay marriage answer. The candidate's reaction was, "I believe in marriage. I've done it three times, and it's none of my business to tell other people how to do it." We had to work that into, "Marriage is something that we understand as being between a man and a woman. I don't think the government should be in the business of discrimination, but it shouldn't be about forcing a new definition of marriage." Reason #233 why I left political work behind a long time ago.