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The shame of us
I'm hard-pressed to figure out how to respond to yesterday's vote -- and boy do I miss Mattnet for its use in sharpening my thoughts. I'm pissed beyond coherence, I'm deeply disappointed in humanity, I'm not really surprised at our pettiness, and I'm feeling as if I flew in from some alternate universe to one that makes no sense.
I'm young enough that I grew up seeing a blatant truth: segregation was morally wrong. In 1997, I was shocked that just 40 years earlier, the blind hatred of blacks was so pervasive that the presence of cameras wasn't a deterrent to behavior as shown in pictures like this one, with people openly spewing invective at their fellow Americans in the streets. The hate was that deep. The behavior is so clearly, so palpably, wrong.
I cannot for the life of me see how this isn't exactly the same thing.
I hear the clamor that gay marriage threatens straight marriage. HOW? Married gay vibes penetrate walls that are impervious to unmarried gay vibes, causing a straight couple to become impotent and then divorced? Ridiculous, yes, but I honestly don't get it. I've not seen one single mechanism proposed for how gay marriage erodes others' marriages. My resulting assumption is that it's something hatemongers know causes a knee-jerk reaction and are exploiting it.
But what, exactly, are we trying to protect? What is marriage and what is its role in our society? What is it beyond a shorthand in social introductions for, "this is my lover, we're committed, we're presumed exclusive, and we're presumed to be in this until one of us dies?"
In my head, I break marriage down into two components: the societal and the personal.
Societal marriage exists to enforce child-rearing responsibilities and to strengthen the unit against outside interference. I'm thinking here of society benefitting from adequate resources being available to raise children and in society reinforcing the importance of the family bond by limiting the power of other relatives, such as in-laws, in issues of inheritance, medical decisions, and so on. Ideally, it reduces social friction because we don't hit on others' exclusive sexual partners. We've come to attach many legal duties and perks to marriage, but those are the societal goals I see as underpinning marriage.
Personal marriage has long been acknowledged in Texas as existing beyond the power of the state to declare. Common law marriage in this state can be as simple as agreeing that you're married and not objecting when introduced as the other's wife or husband. No state or church blessing required. To me, that argues a recognition of "soul mates," a bond outside the purview of either church or state.
Preventing gay people from legally marrying doesn't stop them from falling in love or building lives together or acting as a unit. The number of commitment ceremonies as well as the flood of people to San Francisco when they were suddenly granting marriage licenses argues that personal marriage exists independent of society's view. In effect, societal marriage is a formal acknowledgement of personal marriage.
So, we've now declared that gay people cannot do what they already were not allowed to do. (Lest anyone forget that Texas has never issued a marriage license to a same sex couple.) As best I can tell, the point of this vote was to declare it okay to continue to hate. To walk behind the hated Americans and scream hatred at them for daring to live normal lives.
How small we seem.
I'm young enough that I grew up seeing a blatant truth: segregation was morally wrong. In 1997, I was shocked that just 40 years earlier, the blind hatred of blacks was so pervasive that the presence of cameras wasn't a deterrent to behavior as shown in pictures like this one, with people openly spewing invective at their fellow Americans in the streets. The hate was that deep. The behavior is so clearly, so palpably, wrong.
I cannot for the life of me see how this isn't exactly the same thing.
I hear the clamor that gay marriage threatens straight marriage. HOW? Married gay vibes penetrate walls that are impervious to unmarried gay vibes, causing a straight couple to become impotent and then divorced? Ridiculous, yes, but I honestly don't get it. I've not seen one single mechanism proposed for how gay marriage erodes others' marriages. My resulting assumption is that it's something hatemongers know causes a knee-jerk reaction and are exploiting it.
But what, exactly, are we trying to protect? What is marriage and what is its role in our society? What is it beyond a shorthand in social introductions for, "this is my lover, we're committed, we're presumed exclusive, and we're presumed to be in this until one of us dies?"
In my head, I break marriage down into two components: the societal and the personal.
Societal marriage exists to enforce child-rearing responsibilities and to strengthen the unit against outside interference. I'm thinking here of society benefitting from adequate resources being available to raise children and in society reinforcing the importance of the family bond by limiting the power of other relatives, such as in-laws, in issues of inheritance, medical decisions, and so on. Ideally, it reduces social friction because we don't hit on others' exclusive sexual partners. We've come to attach many legal duties and perks to marriage, but those are the societal goals I see as underpinning marriage.
Personal marriage has long been acknowledged in Texas as existing beyond the power of the state to declare. Common law marriage in this state can be as simple as agreeing that you're married and not objecting when introduced as the other's wife or husband. No state or church blessing required. To me, that argues a recognition of "soul mates," a bond outside the purview of either church or state.
Preventing gay people from legally marrying doesn't stop them from falling in love or building lives together or acting as a unit. The number of commitment ceremonies as well as the flood of people to San Francisco when they were suddenly granting marriage licenses argues that personal marriage exists independent of society's view. In effect, societal marriage is a formal acknowledgement of personal marriage.
So, we've now declared that gay people cannot do what they already were not allowed to do. (Lest anyone forget that Texas has never issued a marriage license to a same sex couple.) As best I can tell, the point of this vote was to declare it okay to continue to hate. To walk behind the hated Americans and scream hatred at them for daring to live normal lives.
How small we seem.
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For me, I don't support freedom of religion. I've admitted bigotry in the open. I have no interest in reviving the Aztec religion in its full glory. Or the Roman, for that matter.
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We can start with ceding Kansas to the idiots (seeing as they've already declared themselves pro-idiot) and carve them a territory of some areas contiguous with Kansas. They can build a wall, of cement and ignorance, and go live in the 11th century.
They can hate whomever they please, they can redefine science however they please, they can teach that a hateful and murderous god is in charge of everything, they can die because they refuse to acknowledge the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria or the new strain of influenza every year. They can spend all their time peeping in each others' windows, worried that someone, somewhere, is happy. They can teach that the heavens revolve around a flat Earth and that the world is just too complex for anything but Divine Creation to explain it. They can condemn a girl for getting pregnant, force her to incubate a fetus, stick her in low-paying jobs where she can't take care of the kid, and then incarcerate the kid and tell her how bad a mother she is. They can conduct trials in which innocence is best proven by dying. They can sit around and feel smugly superior and righteous.
I just don't care any more. I'm really that disgusted with the lot of them and would rather leave them in the ignorance in which they delight in wallowing. What I wouldn't give to have a modern day Australia. Hmmm...wonder if we could accelerate Bush's Mars plan? Then we could send the idiots there!
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Yes! It completely boggles my mind. Several times, I've tried to employ that argument - the one that asks the person who's against gay marriage or gay rights in general to simply substitute another minority group into their protest - and it never works. It should. It should make people think about it and really examine what it is they believe. I'm not saying people aren't free to believe what they want. I'm saying those beliefs might not be as right as they think they are. It certainly wasn't right to make black people sit in the back of the bus or countless other WORSE things even though people believed it was. What those beliefs did was deny a huge group of people basic HUMAN rights.
I have family who insist they have no problem with gay people, they just cannot condone the lifestyle, and that's what they always toss at me. Sorry, but if by not condoning the lifestyle you (general) mean they don't have the right to live what is essentially the EXACT SAME lifestyle you as a heterosexual male or female live, then yes, that DOES mean you have a problem with gay people. The issue IS that they are attracted to the same sex. Switch it around. What if hetero was the frowned upon orientation? Would you be okay with repressing your natural tendency because the 'majority' deemed you 'unnatural' or 'immoral'? Would you think it completely right to be oppressed in such a manner? Somehow I think not.
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I have family who insist they have no problem with gay people, they just cannot condone the lifestyle, and that's what they always toss at me.
And yanno what? They don't have to live it. Nobody is going to force them to live a gay life. They don't have to condone the gay 'lifestyle.' I don't give two shits for how they personally feel about it; it's the actions they take that I mind.
There are lots of various 'lifestyles' I have moral issues with -- so I don't take part in them. I said this elsewhere on
I wish you the best of luck in winning over your family. I'm working on the old guys at my office. I suspect that, just as it took just over 100 years to go from slavery to the Voting Rights Act, it will take more than my lifetime to make it as unthinkable to be an ugly bigot about gays in public.
In my more optimistic moments, I remember how the history of the U.S. has, in large part, been about slowly expanding the Bill of Rights and Constitutional freedoms to more and more Americans. It has never been easy or quick.
In my less optimistic moments, I think how short-lived all that "America United" stuff after 9/11 was.
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I've been thinking about what you wrote here and I think I missed the crucial point here.
Perhaps your family has confused "tolerate" with "condone?" While I'd love it if everyone's hate could evaporate, it just isn't going to. There are many, many things I think of as immoral that I certainly do not condone but choose to tolerate. An obvious example? The Ku Klux Klan. I certainly do not condone their hate but I tolerate them because the alternative is to decide free speech is not for every American.
Perhaps if they thought it was okay to "tolerate" gay marriage because that was different from condoning it, that might change a couple of minds?
Just a thought.
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