Why Do You Have to Prove Me Right?

In July, I wrote about gay marriage and the nonsensicalness of banning it. At the end, I described how the California State Supreme Court overturned a law that banned such, but said that there was still a ballot initiative for banning it in November. While I was hopeful that such an initiative would fail, my better senses continued to tell me otherwise. So, Californians: Why did you have to prove me right?

Proposition 8, the aforementioned ballot initiative, is a state constitutional amendment. Therefore, unlike the previous ban on gay marriage, this one can't simply be overturned by the state Supreme Court: it can only be voided through another amendment.

Florida and Arizona have also voted for the banning of gay marriage. And, what's possibly even more inane, Arkansas's Initiative 1, which prohibits gay couples from adopting.

On what were these decisions based? "Good ol'" Christian values? Fallacies about homosexuality? Outright bigotry and ignorance? I didn't understand where these people were coming from, so I decided to look up some of their arguments for why they think gay marriage should be banned, and I hope to address most of them here.

Allowing gay couples to marry is not giving them "special rights" if they're finally gaining what everyone else has, but what they've been deprived of for so long.

Many want the term "marriage" to strictly mean the union between a man and a woman. But the issue is not of gays getting married in churches, but of having government-recognized unions: something that is open to heterosexual couples, but currently not to homosexual couples. If one wants to limit the definition of "marriage", then the term cannot refer to the secular portion of it at all. Furthermore, there is no need for the fear that the government would force churches to hold marriage ceremonies: there is a separation of church and state, and the government cannot force religious institutions to do anything.

I read a comment somewhere that read, "marriage is a choice, not a right." However, in the secular sense, it is a right. If homosexual couples aren't able to access the same secular privileges as heterosexual couples, why should heterosexual couples have those privileges in the first place? Instead of there simply being a male and a female on the paperwork, there would be a male and a male, or a female and a female; it's not that big of a difference.

I've also read a lot of comments that allowing gay marriage should be "up to the people," and if the people say "no" to gay marriage, case closed. This would make sense if it weren't for the fact that, again, secular gay marriage (which is what these ballots were about) is simply letting homosexual couples have the same secular privileges as heterosexual couples. If the people voted in favor of slavery, it still would not make slavery any more right.

Another comment I've read was written by a parent, worried about their children: they didn't want their kids to "have to decide" their sexual orientation, when they "have enough to deal with." Sexual orientation is not a decision, but something already programmed in our brains, and we cannot "straighten out" an individual. Banning gay marriage is not going to make a teenager's personal quest any easier by having them make "one less decision." In fact, it might make it harder because if he or she is homosexual, he or she may see that as a bad thing and try to conform him or herself into a life that just doesn't fit, and may be ashamed just to be their own self. It's like not talking to your kids about sex: even if you don't speak with them about it, it's not going to make the problem go away. Even if gay marriage is banned, there will still be teenagers learning that they are homosexual or bisexual, though they may feel worse about it because the area in which they live is bigoted against non-heterosexuals.

I've addressed this in my previous posting on this topic, but I'll explicate again: there are many married heterosexual couples today who either can and don't want, or are not able to reproduce. To say that marriage should only be an institution for procreation is outrightly absurd, and takes us all a great stumble backwards to the Dark Ages.

And, to reiterate, gay marriage as proposed in the ballots is referring to the secular unions of couples, not religious unions. The government has no right to interfere in religious organizations (just as religious organizations have no right to interfere with the government).

To repeat a point I previously made, homosexual couples are not "sexually perverse" and "morally depraved" people: they are human beings who, instead of falling in love with people of the opposite gender, they fell in love with people within their own.

Homosexuality is not "contagious". One does not choose to be homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual, and anyone who says otherwise is outrightly lying. Homosexuals are not child molesters: there is no reason to fear the safety of a child if a gay couple wants to adopt him/her, nor should there be any fear that the child will grow up "morally misconstrued" and "become" gay.

It is absolutely sickening that anyone can be against acceptance, or even just tolerance, of homosexuals for the fear that it's teaching children "to be gay or else." There is no homosexual agenda for world domination. There is no satanic plot to turn the world into a cesspool of sin and chaos. Those are just delusions concocted in the paranoid minds of the ultra-religious: minds that crave, minds that need conflict in order to continue to believe in their religion. This "us or them" mentality is quite outdated and useless, especially now, in the 21st Century. And, when ideas become obsolete, they must be thrown aside, lest we step into an interminable spiral of regression.