Keep Your Gays Off My Marriage (repost)

(note: I posted this on another blog of mine on in April of 2006, in response to now-Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's views. With all the talk of Prop 8. in CA, I decide to revisit it. Also, I usually only have one hand to type with due to the baby, so this is easier than something new.)

Someone has to help me out here:
How does having more people in love weaken the power of love?
How would creating more marriage make marriage less meaningful?

I am sorry to be behaving with the innocence of a child and the logic of a sane adult, but I just don't get it.

If I was tired of the "Marriage Debate" during the 2004 election, I am becoming weary to the point of blithering anger at this point.

There is a battle going on here in Minnesota in which a few radicals (Let's call a spade a spade: these people are radical, not conservative) want to put in place a constitutional ban on "gay marriage" that would also include banning "any legal recognition of domestic partnerships and civil unions or any 'legal equivalent' of marriage." Which means that the few benefits that do exist here for same-sex partnerships would go away right along with the hope of anything more.

That's sweet.

I bet Jesus is smiling right now.

Of course, it's a republican chick from an affluent bedroom community who has been trying to walk this pampered little pooch for a couple of years now. She wants to "protect traditional marriage." Don't these people have anything else to worry about? Apparently if Rick and Tom get married, or Susie and Michelle, this lady's marriage to her man will somehow be less meaningful, begging the question, how meaningful can it possibly be now?

Before I pitch an apoplectic fit that starts with "WHO CARES...?" and ends with a dull thunk as I pass out from emotional confusion on my heterosexual living room floor within the context of my heterosexual-about-to-be-legally-recognized-by-the-state-relationship, I'd like to know what makes me so special? Show me a constitutional reason why my relationship gets to be different from anyone else's? I mean, I think it's a pretty good relationship--really good, not to toot my own horn or Pete's (that's against the law, too), but because he has a penis, and I don't, that means we can legally be married? That's not really much of an achievement (sorry, Pete. No offense).

It just seems like such a waste of righteous anger. You're a dude, and you don't want to marry a dude? DON'T. This is America. You don't have to. You're a kristian, and you think being gay is wrong? Fine! Don't be! See: Declaration of Independence/Inalienable rights/"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Last time I checked, we are not living in a theocracy, and we are actually fighting wars overseas so that other people don't get to, either. We don't have a state religion or even a state language, for that matter. We have an official bird, that we almost poisoned into extinction, but our government does not tell people how to worship (ok, ok, I know this is all only "in theory" lately). All that "In God We Trust" and "under God" malarky was added in the 1950's (even then, it does not say which God.). These kristians can yak all they want about "My Bible this..." and "My Bible that..." Whatever. My favorite book is Wuthering Heights, but that does not mean that I get to make other people dig up and hug their dead lovers or force children to marry each other and live in seclusion on the wasted moors of northern England. Just because some people believe that the Bible is a divine text does not make it so. Just because some people believe that their translation of that "divine text" says that marriage is between one man and one woman, does not create a basis for a Law in the United States of America.

Many of our ancestors came here to get away from that sort of oppression.

The thing is, it's important to try to stop these people before we slide completely into a theocratic corporate oligarchy, but this is really a smokescreen issue, as far as I can see. Like abortion. The Konservatives are using a scattershot technique on socially liberal thinkers to keep us from being able to devote our focused attention on any one issue. You want to stop drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? We'll ban abortion in South Dakota! War in Iraq? No! Were banning gay marriage! They toss out these social issues to get people all rankled while they gather power and money to themselves. In the end, in this country, those are the things that really matter. I don't believe that the Bush Administration cares one whit about gay marriage and abortion. They care about corporate welfare, power grabs, tax breaks, influence, and cronyism. They let the state senators and lesser minions do the dirty social politics work.

I am not gay. I am not going to turn gay if I watch Ellen or spend too much time with drag queens or see Brokeback Mountain. I don't think I am going to want to marry a woman any time soon (planning one wedding is quite enough, thank you.) On a very base and selfish level, this issue does not affect me. But I don't live that way. Any attempt to diminish my fellow Americans diminishes me and diminishes this country. Denying basic rights to other Americans makes me less of an American. And less of a human. What happens to others matters to me. I live in a country that used to encourage self-reliance as a tool for being able to help others, but it seems that self-reliance has turned to selfishness.

It does not matter to these people what actually happens to their fellow citizens as long as those citizens are living by a specific, enforced, neo-fundamentalist religious code. Living in squalor with an abusive boyfriend and a new baby when you are 17? At least you did not have an abortion! We saved you from hell! Are you in the hospital, dying of a terminal illness and want to leave your estate to your same-sex partner? Too bad! You don't deserve to because your choices are evil and you are going to hell!

After all, Jesus is only happy when people are hurting because they brought it on themselves.