Gay Rights And Heartless Idiots

The gay marriage debate in the US rages on. I've said it before, but I'm happy to reiterate: "If you oppose to gay marriage, it's because you're a heartless fucking idiot." And here's why:

Your opposition is unconstitutional. Thanks to a little something called the 14th Amendment, you're not allowed to give rights to one set of people and deny them to another. It is for this reason that federal attempts to block gay marriage have always taken the form of a constitutional amendment.

You are being used by politicians who don't share your values. Not to be overly cynical, but the GOP didn't care about gays one way or the other until about mid-way through the Carter administration when they discovered that WASP's could be manipulated by way of hot-button issues like gay rights and abortion. Do you need any more evidence than George W. Bush? Twice he ran on a platform of banning gay marriage and abortion, but his legislative career was defined by tax cuts and the War on Terror. Apart from a paltry attempt at a marriage amendment (that was soundly defeated), he made little effort to ban gay marriage or abortion--at the very least you, it was a low priority in his White House. But you just went along with it. Why?

Because you're a heartless fucking idiot, that's why.

There is no biblical definition of marriage. But based on anecdotal evidence of righteous people throughout the Bible, a good working definition might be this: "A marriage is a relationship between exactly one man and however many women he can afford".

You're in great company. The traditional enemies of America are Nazis, Communists, and Muslim Fundamentalists (of a terrorist bent). What do they all have in common? They all oppress(ed) homosexuals.

Homophobia is not biblical. The biblical case against homosexuality is thin, at best. Leviticus and Numbers call homosexuality an abomination, but they say the same about shellfish and poly-cotton blends. Paul condemns homosexuals, but in the same breath he condemns fornicators and drunkards--two things that an overwhelming number of Christians also are or have been. There is some homosexuality in the story of Sodom and Gammorah, but when Ezekiel recounts it, he doesn't list "sodomy" among Sodom's sins. Instead, he complains that they "did not help the poor and needy", which is in line with the teachings of Jesus--who never, never, not once, says anything about homosexuality.

Not that any of this matters, because the Bible is full of things that you ignore anyway. Christians eat pork and hate their enemies. I've never known a Christian to sell off half of their possessions and give the money to the poor--which was something that Jesus recommended if memory serves. You say that you oppose gay rights because you follow the scriptures, but you are lying through your wicked teeth. The truth is that you cite scripture because you were already a bigot.

And a heartless fucking idiot.

Homophobia kills. I was originally going to go with the child-murderer argument, but that's somewhat disingenuous. It's an emotional appeal and it severely underplays the amount of death that homophobia causes. I alternately could have invoked Godwin's Law and brought up the 5,000-15,000 homosexuals killed during the Holocaust. But even that misses the gravity of the situation.

Instead, let's talk about AIDS.

AIDS has now killed over 25 million people. In 2007 alone, it killed over 300,000 children. It has decimated the populations of several sub-Saharan African nations, and continues to do so. It has killed over a half a million Americans. It is a pandemic. The illness was identified in 1981 and recognized immediately as dangerous, but it went largely ignored by health officials and politicians. Ronald Reagan wouldn't even mention the disease publicly until 1987. Why?

The public thought of AIDS as a gay problem. In 1982 the CDC showed that AIDS could be spread through heterosexual contact and lobbied to stop calling it "GRID" (or Gay-Related Immune Disease). But the perception was this was a gay disease, and Reagan would have lost face with his Christian base if he'd brought it up. And Republicans continue to vote against funding AIDS research even now because a little of that "AIDS = Gay" stigma lingers.

You and your ilk have sat on your thumbs for thirty years and allowed a disease to spiral into an out-of-control pandemic (and don't kid yourselves, it's still out-of-control) because at the time it seemed that that disease only affected homosexuals. At a certain level, "heartless fucking idiot" just doesn't carry enough bile to convey how loathsome that is. It makes me wish there was a WASP-Related Immune Disease, so that 20 years from now the rest of the world would be free of your lamentable, negligent, murderous bigotry.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly...

You're going to lose, eventually, anyway. Gay rights are slowly advancing, even if it's in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of way. Gay marriage is just the latest link in the chain. Today's legislators were raised during a time when homosexuality was regarded as a soul-crushing illness that must be stamped out. Small wonder that people like Larry Craig end up as closeted self-loathers. But the culture has changed and will continue to change. Sixty years from now, no one will understand the culture war that went on or how anyone could be against gay marriage--just like it's impossible for us to conceive of a world in which interracial marriages were illegal.

So let's recap. You oppose gay marriage, despite the lack of biblical justification, in defiance of the US Constitution. Your opposition has been leveraged to pass fiscally irresponsible legislation and start unjust wars. Your opposition is rooted in a phobia that you share with Nazis and Muslim fundamentalist terrorists, and it's the same phobia that people use to justify the murder of children and the negligence that is at least tangentially responsible for the greatest pandemic in generations. And your best-case scenario is to postpone the inevitable.

I'd say "heartless fucking idiot" sums you up pretty neatly.

]{p