Very well written article about America's bigotry-

"Its wrong for women not to have rights....Its wrong for people of color to be treated differently than whites.........but gays are still banned."

(I did not write this, its from a great website called Demonbaby.....TONS of great stuff, funny, crazy, political, everything. Check it out. http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/)




(note: this is a continuation of yesterday's entry)

As the world continues to celebrate this week's small but welcome return to common sense in American politics, and liberals everywhere are filled with hope for the future, let us not forget something very important: The American people haven't changed. Sure, a few more of us have finally acknowledged that the Iraq war is a cataclysmic disaster and something needs to be done about it, but beyond that, we're still the same nation bitterly divided between intelligent, rational people and closed-minded simpletons. How else do you explain seven more states voting to ban gay marriage on tuesday? Yes, amidst Democratic victories there were seven losses for common sense, as voters in Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin all decided to actively take away legal rights from a specific group of people.

Strip away whatever you might think about homosexuality for a moment, and really think about that: 20 of the 50 United States - the home of the free, the land of equal rights and opportunity - now have passed laws for the specific purpose of taking away the rights of certain people, purely because they are scared. They're scared of what they don't understand, because their superstitious little brains have been sealed off to other types of identity by a misguided interpretation of a very old book. No, not all homophobia is derived from religious beliefs, but you can be damned sure that Christianity is the driving force behind our country's growing gay discrimination.

I'm not gay, and I'm not some sort of gay rights activist - but this particular issue infuriates me, because it's rooted so wholly in ignorance. There is not one single valid reason in the entire universe why gay people should not be allowed to have every single legal right that straight people do, and to think otherwise is to be wrong. Period. I don't usually say this, but you're simply, unequivocally WRONG if you think that way.

Now, sometimes people will try and pretend that these laws aren't discrimination, because marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman, and we should not redefine it, and if gay people want to have their own marriage but call it something else, that's all well and good. Well, there are a number of problems with that reasoning, but here's the main one: Marriage isn't just some fun little thing that people do when they're in love. It's not just vows and rice and rings and gift registries at Bed Bath & Beyond. It's a legal commitment, recognized by the government, which gives you special rights, tax cuts, etc that couples who are not married do not have access to. So, if you want to save the word "marriage" for the straight couples - if that's really so important - then at the very least you have to introduce a new form of marriage specifically for gay couples that is a recognized legal commitment with the exact same privileges of straight marriage. It's funny how none of these gay marriage bans have managed to include that part of the deal. And that is where these laws should be exposed as pure discrimination, but because fundamental Christian beliefs are aggressively embedded into this country's moral consciousness like termites in the walls of a decaying house, there just aren't enough people who get it.

Not that I should be surprised. We are, after all, a country with a long history of bigotry. We used to burn women we thought were witches. We used to own slaves. Until 1920, women couldn't vote. And merely a generation ago we were still restricting peoples' rights simply because of the color of their skin. These days, most everyone recognizes that it was pretty fucked up to have laws preventing black people from voting, or make them sit on the back of the bus, etc. But have we really learned anything? Apparently not, because legal discrimination is still taking place all across the country. It's institutionalized homophobia. Sexual apartheid. It's state law saying, in no uncertain terms, "you are a second-class citizen for being gay."

My parents are divorced, so it's easy for me to see that straight people suck at marriage just as much as gay people would. The conservatives, however, will portray the "sanctity of marriage" as something that needs defending. And they're right, it does - only it needs defending from themselves, not gays. With over half of U.S. marriages ending in divorce, and thirty percent of all straight women having reported physical or sexual abuse by their significant others - it seems to me that straight people are doing plenty to ruin the sanctity of marriage on their own.

What makes this all simultaneously funny and infuriating is the increasing evidence that Christian Conservative America - the very source of the ongoing organized attack on gay rights - is secretly home to more steamy gay sex than a San Francisco bath house. These poor bastards let themselves be tormented with their sexuality rather than simply acknowledging that it's just the way they are, and there's nothing wrong with it, and maybe the Bible is a book of parables from a thousand years ago not meant to be taken quite so seriously. You really see how powerful and dangerous religious indoctrination can be when it pits people even against themselves. This recent editorial on the closeted conservatives subject suggests that "One sure measure of any society's psychological well-being lies in its attitude to homosexuality." If that's the case - and I genuinely believe that it is - then America needs a lot of therapy.

Ultimately, there's no difference between a gay marriage having the same rights as a straight marriage, and a black person using the same drinking fountain as a white person. And the fact that more than half of our country can't recognize that makes me wonder if we've made any progress at all since the 1960's. Keep in mind that rallying Christian Conservatives against gay marriage has been one of the key successes of Karl Rove's manipulative strategy with the Bush campaign - and clearly, despite letting some Democrats slip into congress, people are still by and large on Bush's side with this one. You can expect him to use that boon to his advantage as much as possible over the next couple years, because it's all he has left. Things may yet get a lot worse for equal rights in this country before they get better.