I Protect Marriage

I Protect Marriage

California is on the cusp of doing something really, really remarkable. Oh wait, it has already done something truly remarkable – it’s letting the gays get married. Awesome possum. A civil marriage can be done in as little as five minutes with an officiate and a few witnesses so that couples who have been together for 15, 20, 30 years can just “get it over with” because well, they’re approaching the age where their partner may need them to be their power of attorney and make difficult decisions for them if they are not in the right mind to do so. Think about that for a second, loving someone so much you’ll let them decide whether or not you should be kept on life support or if a radical new procedure should be tried on you in the hopes to save your life. Straight people get this right the second they are married (legally), gay people have to beg, plead, hope their partner’s family is accepting of them, and pray they are not in an anti-gay state or city so that a hospital will have some compassion on them and allow them to see their dying partner in the last minutes of their life. This is not fair.

So I thought I was done my ranting and raving about how it’s completely idiotic to deny marriage to two people because they are the same gender after my beautiful country said “yeah Darek, you’re right, my bad” and allowed me to get hitched. But with our own federal election coming up, talks that the conservative government may bring back the same-sex marriage debate (again!) and fears that we may get a majority conservative government – it’s time, once again to slap idiots in the face via my blog and show them they are wrong for thinking the way they do – and awaaaaaaay we go!

www.iprotectmarriage.com is the latest initiative by the religious-right pretending to simply be conservative minded people to get young people to vote yes on Prop 8 – the legislation that would ban same-sex marriage in California. The site is completely full of shit but I found great joy in their “decide for yourself” quiz which asks eight questions about whether or not gays should be allowed to get married. If your answer agrees with the nonsense they spew, you get a pop up of a young person telling you “good for you” and a scary “fact” to hit the point home that gays will eat your babies and dance in the river of blood that will flood your suburban streets when you allow a gardener and an interior designer the right to file a tax return together. If your answer has common sense then you are berated and asked stupid questions that don’t really relate to the issue at hand.

Here are the questions:

1. Should two people who love each other have the right to get married?

If you answer yes, ugly dude and girl with weird nose comes and asks if they have the right to marry their mothers or sisters or fathers because they love them. As soap operas have shown us for decades, there is a difference between being in love with someone and loving someone. Also gay-marriage isn’t about polygamy, incest, pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia, it’s about gay-marriage, allowing two consenting adults to conduct their lives as they wish in a legal manner.
The funny thing is, if you answer no, you essentially get the same response from ugly dude and girl with weird nose, but with a different word here and there. Instead of “I love my mom, but does that mean I can marry her if I wish?” you get “Right. I love my mom, but that doesn’t mean I can marry her if I wish”
It’s also the sneaky tactic of the questioning – the question itself doesn’t address the issue at hand – can any two people get married if they wish? Of course not, what if one is dead and the other a child? What if they both have the same parents? These situations (which have nothing to do with homosexuality and gay rights) are illegal and wrong. Being gay and wanting the country you pay taxes to, to recognize that, isn’t wrong.

2. Is it fair that judges can overturn the majority vote of the people?

Short hand answers – if you say no, you can get a thumbs up from brown dude, if you say yes, he asks “what’s the point of voting then?”

But this question holds A LOT more weight then some would think. There is loads of difference between legal and unjust. Something that is “legal” (voted in by the majority in a democratic society) can still be unjust. Case in point, interracial marriages – people voted that legislation into law but they are still wrong for doing so; not misguided, not conservative, not racist (well ok, yes they were/are racist) they are wrong to have done that. Issues that are unjust will always be unjust regardless of their legality. An unjust issue is unjust because of its nature; a legal (or illegal) issue is legal (or illegal) because of the will of the people. People are flawed by design, by upbringing, by chance, and by many more factors.

The issue of gay-marriage is an issue of justice, not law. It’s is wholly unjust to tell a couple of adults they do not have the same rights as another couple of adults because the majority will back them up on the issue (especially when back-up is provided by hateful, religious rhetoric). Again for those set up to start about incest and pedophilia and bestiality, refer to question 1.

3. Do you think it’s fair to teach a first grader the alternative lifestyle?

Short answer – if you say yes, sorrowful Chinese lady comes with sorrowful Chinese voice and warns about the dangers of telling first graders there are gays amongst us; if you answer no, she tells you you’re right and then uses another scare-fact-tactic telling you of the horrors that some first graders ARE told that there are gays among us.

What sorrowful Chinese lady doesn’t realize (well actually I’m sure she does, she’s a sneaky cog in their religious-right’s fear-tactic machine) is that a first grader’s education about homosexuality will not involve an in-depth discussion including dental dam regarding my lesbian sisters or douching regarding my gay brothers. It will involve one or two story books about a couple of male penguins rescuing an egg and raising it together or about a King that prefers princes to princesses followed by a 5 minute talk by the teacher that “while most men like women and women like men, there are some men who like men and some women who like women – and there’s nothing wrong with that”.
But again it’s the fear and banking on that young people are stupid that this website is trying to strike it rich with. Prove them wrong young people of Cali, prove them wrong!

4. Do you think its discrimination for a church to refuse to marry a gay couple?

If you answer no, preacher brown man comes up and says “absolutely right, we’re just practicing our religious right to blah blah blah” and if you answer yes he essentially calls you a hypocrite and blah blah blah.
Gay people want LEGAL recognition of marriage. Not religious-recognized marriage. We never have. If a church won’t marry us, we most likely won’t be part of that church or push to get married in that church. It’s entirely different if the church itself brings up the issue because it’s doing so from questions being thrown its way en masse.
I always think of this argument like one of those awful sitcoms sketches where the gay character says he’s not interested in the straight character and then the straight character is kinda offended because he thinks he’s the shit so what’s wrong with him that a gay dude doesn’t wanna perform a Spanish lawnmower on him? Really churches, it’s not you, it’s us, you’re just not our type…*awkward silence*

5. Is it fair for schools to teach the consequences of the heterosexual way of life but not the alternative lifestyle?

I can’t really give you a short hand answer to picking yes or no because I can’t tell what the political-right answer is. But the contradictions present in this question are outstanding. So we shouldn’t be teaching kids about gay people but we should be teaching them about the STD’s gay people can catch? How will kids know what diseases/infections gay people can catch if they don’t know what gay people are?

Anyways slightly attractive guy pops up and informs everyone that men ages 16-25 have the greater risk of contracting HIV (false – also look at his eyes, he’s clearly reading from a cue card) and that 53% of patients that acquired HIV are gay or bisexual men. So in other words 47% of patients that contracted HIV are not gay or bisexual men. Can I then assume it’s pretty much a 50/50 chance of catching HIV regardless of your gender or orientation? What’s the point then?

HIV is primarily a male-disease, specifically men who engage in unsafe sex practices (this does not mean homosexual practices). Men who are on the “downlow” (typically black men who are too ashamed of their orientation, they put up the front of heterosexuality but yearn for dong and cheat on their women with men and contract something), closeted men, stupid gay/bisexual men and men who have been cheated on by their partner and caught something from them.

But why do these men do what they do? Maybe because society is telling them they are different and something is wrong with them and if they don’t change or at least hide who they are, then rights will be taken away from, child custody will be awarded to the state, and their families will shun them? Wouldn’t it then therefore make sense that children (yes first graders) should be educated that there is nothing wrong with being gay and something very wrong with cheating and engaging in unsafe sex practices (the sex talk can be had a later age, obviously)?

It’s the implied correctness of the question that is so goddamn sneaky it makes me sick! The “consequences” of the “alternative” lifestyle are essentially the same as the consequences of the heterosexual lifestyle – the answer to both is education and acceptance and not forcing religious doctrine down the throats of students in the guise of political discussion and/or science.

6. Do you think its “okay” to say that same-sex marriage is wrong?

If you say yes, Asian looking girl pops up really quickly and says “you’re awesome, neither do I; we’re all entitled to our own opinion”. If you say no, you would think that the exact same response would pop up, but instead you get Asian looking girl asking if it was “love” when a GLBT director of an AIDS organization referred to AIDS as a gay disease and that loving someone means to warn them.

I’m not exactly sure why she’s a) talking about love (the question asks if it’s “okay”) and b) warn me against what? I don’t think I have ever had one of my friends say, after I came out to them, “Well Darek, watch out, gays like to stalk along trees and fall on you when you walk underneath, always walk with an umbrella”.

HIV/AIDS is a disease that has afflicted many, many people and is particularly close to the gay community (especially in the states) because the Reagan administration took EIGHT YEARS before finally acknowledging that HIV/AIDS was something to worry about. Just like breast cancer is primarily a woman’s disease, just like prostate cancer is a man’s disease, HIV/AIDS is a gay person’s disease. We associate with the pain it’s caused and the pain caused to us because of certain peoples lack of response to an epidemic.

By the way Asian looking girl, you’re a cunt.

7. Some Prop 8 supporters preach about Jesus and God’s love isn’t it hypocritical to be against two people in love getting married?

If you say yes, Filipina pops up and says, very sorrowfully, “if you’re going to bring Jesus into this…” – OH NO HO’! I didn’t bring Jesus into anything, YOU asked ME. Anyways she continues on to say that Jesus told people to love God, which means to tell people to obey God (the Christian God of course, that silly Vishnu or Allah nonsense doesn’t mean a thing) and by bringing someone into your life, it’s your job (according to Jeebus) to help them obey God. She ends with saying Jesus says marriage was meant for one man and one woman and thats how we can obey God. But the thing is…he never said that. I’m going by the King James version, you know, the first version to be translated into English. Now I think the Bible is full of crap and due to it’s many, many re-translations, you can’t really trust what it says (but it’s cool that it tells people to just chill and love each other and God, I guess) but Jesus, according to the King James version (in the New Testament), never ONCE mentions a word about homosexuality.

He mentions a lot of sexual deviants, perverts, necrophiliacs, incest, bestiality and molesters but never one word about homosexuals. If was the puritans and their forefathers that added the word “homosexual” to this list because they assumed that’s what God meant (and I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt here, I personally think they just added the word in to be hateful cunt rags). I should know I spent weeks in my chapel (before coming out), holding back tears, hoping I wouldn’t find a negative word about homosexuals said by Jesus, when I was in high school and I didn’t. Sorry Christians, I’m going to have to trump your interpretation of the Bible with mine, since my upbringing’s older :p

If you say no, Filipina pops up and equates that since her parents may love her completely, they don’t approve of her completely and same thing with Jesus. But um, that’s a cop-out no? ESPECIALLY when the thing which is being sought for approval is something you were BORN WITH, something Jesus made you born with? Oh wait, Christians don’t believe that, so with that, we’re onto question 8…

8. Do you think the struggle for interracial marriages in the 50’s and 60’s are equal to the struggle of same-sex marriage today?

If you answer no, white-washed black girl, whom I’ll call, oh let’s use, Tiffany, says “great answer”. She’s wearing pink and glasses and her hair is straight, so hey, as a white dude, it’s hip that she agrees me, yaaaaaaaaaay acceptance by the black community!

If you answer yes, Tiffany and other black girl pop up and whine and sulk about how they were born black and other black girl says how she can’t be counseled out of her “blackness” (she’s really black everyone, she has a white tank top on and her hair is in a short ponytail). She also claims that gays go into therapy and achieve “results”. Then Tiffany comes up and says how it’s offensive to compare our identical struggles for acceptance because, well, they aren’t identical and I chose my lifestyle while she didn’t choose that ugly that top…I mean her ethnicity.

So here we go – guess what bitches, our struggles are they same, why? Because your grandfather would have been lynched or had bricks thrown at him or denied the right to sit in café (regardless if it were designated for “coloreds” or “whites”) if he loved a white woman. Guess what would happen to gay people, if they wanted to publically express their love, at the time of your grandfathers? And I don’t mean butt-sex in front of kindergarteners or snow balling in front of a church – I mean holding hands while window shopping or a kiss goodbye at the airport.

It is absolutely infuriating when straight conservative religious people tell me and thousands upon thousands of other gay people that I chose my orientation. I usually shoot back with “then give me the date you chose your heterosexual orientation” and the thing is, they can’t. Because they never chose this. Ergo, they were born that way, ergo I was born this way, ergo your faith is telling you a lie (You’re not born a gay, you’re born again) ergo you have to make the decision to rethink your faith. That’s the underlying issue, a cowardice in holding to an incorrect faith because of what it’ll mean or embracing the fact that hey "John likes Larry and Christina likes Mary and George likes Cheryl" and everyone of those combinations plus many more are fine and I don’t really need to stress about this issue because well my country is going bankrupt fighting an illegal war.

So American Californian youth, sit back and look, really, really look at the state of the world, at Massachusetts, at Vermont, at Canada, at the Netherlands, at Spain and see if their societies have been destroyed or if up is down or if God has destroyed them and think, really think, that perhaps what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes is their business and none of yours and how utterly offensive it is for them to now have to ask (read: beg) you to let them go about their lives. Be part of a history that makes positive change in the society you will only be a part of for 80 years; it’s the only way to ensure your immortality.