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.

On Gay Marriage and Moral America

Be forewarned: this is a fairly long piece, so those with short attention spans may want to open a second tab/window and flip back-and-forth between this and that.
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I remember in 2004 when I first became interested in current events and issues. This was the election year between Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and incumbent President Bush. I was of the Republican mindset: the Iraq war was meant to “liberate” the people there; global warming isn’t happening; the government isn’t doing anything unconstitutional. Whenever the issue of gay marriage was brought up, I would simply slide past it, explaining it away as a non-issue: while allowing homosexuals to marry, I would say, how is that at all important compared to the starving kids in other countries? How is their ability to be legally recognized as a couple anywhere near as important as helping the poor, the homeless? Well, now that I’m a little older and better able to see things a tad more clearly, I call that entire position bollocks.

The problem with my answer was that it was a nonanswer, it was simply a dodge from a needlessly controversial topic. So going to war was more important than helping the poor? Apparently so, according to my former logic. Then again, I was barely a teenager at the time, but since then, I’ve abandoned that sort of logic. Sadly and apparently, many, many others haven’t tossed aside their archaic notions in the face of reality, but instead turn to the comforts of illogic and outdated social values.

We like to call the United States a nation of the free, of liberty, and take pride in our forefathers’ (and foremothers’) rebellious actions. However, according to my calculations and observations, we have yet to earn those descriptors, and our forefathers may be astounded to see what kind of a nation we’ve become. Our nation's founders hoped to establish a country with a thick boundary between the territories of church and state, and unfortunately, as one may observe today simply by knowing that as of this date, only two states have legalized gay marriage (well, that number may soon be back down to one, as I will explain later), that said boundary is thinner than the paper the Bill of Rights was written on.

For centuries, the union between a man and a woman has been seen as the only “natural” union, and that any same-sex couple is “unnatural.” Well, back in the days when the Catholic Church was in total control (the Dark Ages, to be clear), chastity was seen as the best way to live a clean, pure life; however, it was understood that one would fall to the earthly pleasures, and marriage was an option. The latter included other details in the contract: one must stay married with their partner for the rest of their life; and, once married, it was necessary that one have as big a family as possible. Of course, this meant that marriages could only be given between a man and a woman: in man-man or woman-woman relationships, no children could be begotten, and therefore said relations were unholy (man-woman relations were unholy enough, even after a marriage ceremony, and if one were to be divorced, the Church would not allow one to have their second marriage within a house of worship).

Somehow, this mentality of sex being a dirty, unholy thing has stuck all through time to this era, the twenty-first century. It was difficult enough in the twentieth century to just declare most sexual freedoms (beginning in the 1930s with the flappers, then in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and gradually progressing from there), but we still have light years to go until society ends with this bipolar mentality that “sex is bad unless we’re selling something.”

It almost surprises me when I hear people say that society is going down the drain, when we’re actually freer sexually than we were one hundred years ago. Granted, I do not endorse the objectification of women (or men, for that matter), nor do I support unsafe sex practices. The way the government is handling the issue of sex, however, is totally inappropriate and ineffective: instead of lowering the rate of teenage pregnancy, the uninformative abstinence-only education programs that depend on scare tactics rather than actual educational materials have in fact led to the increase in teen pregnancies. We should be teaching why having sex before eighteen might not be a great idea, what actually happens during the act, and ways to protect oneself should one decide to do it anyway. Instead, we are teaching why sex is dirty and evil, except after marriage. We are telling kids that if they have sex they will die, without further detail. We are telling kids that having sex is “like opening a present before Christmas, and once you’re married, it’s like you’re regifting.” Honestly, with talk like that, kids are more likely to blow you off as some crackpot, and go right on having sex, not knowing what to expect.

Along the same vein, we’ve got our government (and ourselves) promoting discriminatory policies with our reproductive organs in mind, this time with the bans on gay marriage. Proponents of banning gay marriage vary in their reasons as to why such unions should be prohibited. Some do so for religious purposes. Some say it’s “unnatural” because such unions produce no offspring. Still others oppose same-sex marriage because it’s not traditional – marriage has always been between a man and a woman, they say, and doing anything different might lead down a slippery slope where a man can marry a dog!

America, as one may or may not know, is not a “Christian nation.” On the contrary, one of the reasons that separation of church and state is so important was not to keep the government out of church affairs, but to keep the church affairs out of the government. Our founding fathers were deists, not Christians, and when they saw the mess going on in England – the powerful Protestants’ discrimination towards Catholics which led to a fierce rivalry that continued up through the twenty-first century – they fully understood the fact that should any theology come to dominate government policy, the only assured outcome would be inequity towards minority religions. The last thing we want to do in the United States is to pass legislation in favour of any theology, and supporting the prohibition of gay marriage would be supporting the dominance of religion in the government (not that this has stopped government policies such as the 1919 Prohibition of alcohol – the Eighteenth Amendment, which was finally repealed by the Twenty-First amendment in 1933).

The whole argument that homosexuality is “unnatural” is totally unfounded: homosexual behaviour has not only been observed in other animals, but as a natural occurrence in humans, as well, for one’s sexual preference is rooted in the brain. How exactly this is so (in a nature vs. nurture sense) is not exactly certain, but what is known is that gender preference isn’t a choice: it’s as natural as heterosexuality. To say that homosexual marriage is wrong because it won’t produce offspring is to totally disregard infertile couples who have tried so hard to have children, or who don’t even want any children at all.

The argument for tradition is a feeble argument, at best. It was also once a tradition for people to marry within their own race, and interracial marriages were legally prohibited; however this is no longer the way because such policies flagrantly denied individuals the right to choose with whom they may know as family. It was seen that separation only led to inequality, and archaic conventions of segregation were tossed aside to make way for true equality.This should happen with any tradition that happens to impede on the rights of any citizen: that tradition should be deemed useless in the current society, and thrown out. To deny that this scenario is a mirror to the situation for gay couples today is to be blinded by outdated societal values. I understand that the term “marriage” traditionally refers to the union between a man and a woman, but these unions are still recognized by the government, opening the married couple to legal benefits that unmarried couples don’t have access to. It would at least be appropriate to term the legally recognized unions as civil unions, allowing gay couples to have the legal benefits of married couples. Unfortunately, this is tied in with another tradition: the “sanctity” of marriage (and, apparently, civil unions).

Many folks fear that allowing gay couples to marry would lead to the destruction of the “sanctity” of marriage, even leading down a slippery slope of bestiality and perversion. This baseless argument is irksome to me the most, because it paints homosexuals as not only perverted freaks who wish to partake in sex with their dogs, but also implies that homosexuals are less than human. Gay people are ordinary people: they eat the same cereals as we do, wear the same sweaters as we do, listen to the same music we do. Those who want to get married want to do so because they are in love, not because all they want is “sex, sex, sex.” They don’t want to marry their dog, or sleep with their cat: they just want to make a total commitment to the one they love. Isn’t that what heterosexual couples want (most of the time)? It is utterly disgusting that anyone could think that such an inane line of reasoning has any basis in reality.

Furthermore, to say that banning same-sex unions would be “protecting the sanctity of marriage” is utter nonsense in itself: if it needed any protection, one would think such proponents for marriage’s “sanctity” would first target domestic abuse and divorce. Honestly, I’ve never seen such kindergarten arguments since elementary school: and they’re all coming from what one would assume are mature adults!

On Thursday, May 15, 2008, the California State Supreme Court overturned state legislation prohibiting gay marriage, becoming the second state, after Massachusetts, to legalize same-sex marriage. This was all based on a ruling against a state ban on interracial marriage over sixty years ago. If you haven’t heard, thousands of gay couples in California have gone to finally get married, and were able to celebrate their unions. However, to paraphrase Andy Griffith, I’m afraid we’re picking our peaches before they’re ready: in November of this year, there will be a ballot initiative that will finally decide whether California is a free state or not. The initiative is a state constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage, overriding the State Supreme Court’s decision, and thereby making every single civil union between same-sex couples invalid. What could be a step forward towards a freer America may just be a fall backward towards the Dark Ages. While I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the outcome this November, I’m certainly not going to hold my breath.


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Apologies for my writing being a bit more off than usual: it's late, but I really felt the need to post this. The font(s) might also be a tad "wonky", as one of my comrades would say. I may edit this later for any grammatical/spelling errors.

Edit: I edited the post for a bit more clarity.