Posts Tagged ‘marriage equality’
Seven Ways Gay Marriage Hurts Heterosexual Marriage
Yes, a navy chaplain has come up with a list of seven ways that gay marriage has hurt his marriage. What can I say, the douchebaggery coming from people who hate gays is reaching new heights as the rest of the world grows up and moves out of the Middle Ages. This guy isn’t just grasping at straws, he’s making them up out of whole cloth. I will address each point in turn since some of them are just begging to be refuted. My comments are in italics. Just that he calls it the “homosexulization of marriage” shows that he is another anti-gay person with a bizarre fixation on how other people are having sex, but I digress. Here, in the chaplain’s own words:
“Here are 7 ways the homosexualization of “marriage” has de-valued the traditional marriages of all Christian families, including my own:
1. It has made our traditional marriage less valuable in the eyes of the state.
This one is a word salad, I’m not even sure what it is supposed to mean. First of all, “traditional marriage” is a meaningless phrase, marriage has changed throughout history and has evolved considerably just this century. And wtf are “the eyes of the state?” Basically it sounds like he is saying that the more people get married, the less his marriage is worth. There’s like only so much marriage value to go around and gays are spreading it thinner?
2. It has forced Christian couples to pay more taxes to make up for the homosexual “bonus pay” now issued by as tax-benefits given to gay “married” couples.
So? The amount of money we are talking about is trivial at best. And at worst, this is just another fucktard upset that some of his tax money goes to something he doesn’t approve of. Guess what, that has always been the case and always will be the case, so this is nothing new. If you don’t like it, don’t pay taxes. He’s also got it backwards, until now gays had to subsidize HIS marriage with their taxes, how come he doesn’t have a problem with that. Oh, right … only his medieval “Christian” values count.
3. It has de-valued by inflation our dollars in our family’s bank accounts by increasing the national debt to pay for more government benefits for gay “married” couples, for which the Fed must print new dollars to pay such debt.
This is basically a restatement of point number two. And the amount of inflation we are talking about here would require an electron microscope to see.
4. It has taken away the rights of Christian couples and Catholic charities to foster or adopt children in states like Massachusetts, as my friend Amy Contrada proves here.
First of all, there are no “rights” to adopt or foster children, so he’s either an idiot or deliberately using the word in a context where it does not apply. And yes, some states insist that foster and adoptive parents not be religious zealots who are going to indoctrinate their children with their extreme religious beliefs. So? Also, wtf does this even have to do with marriage equality? Nothing.
5. It has hurt our national security and therefore our family’s safety by de-funding benefits given to straight couples or weapon systems and re-distributing those Pentagon dollars to gay “married” couples.
Again, break out the electron microscope to see how much funding we are talking about here. And again, this is just a restatement of points number two and three. This is like reading a bad high school paper where the kid didn’t do any research and just kept repeating the same things in different ways to make the paper long enough. Pathetic.
6. It has hurt our ability to worship Almighty God in a Christian chapel building whose altar has been desecrated by homosexual “weddings” depriving us of a sacred worship space.
This is both a lie …. and really sick shit. First of all, no one has suggested forcing any church to perform a gay marriage, and there are no legal ways to do that. Secondly, he’s just saying he thinks gays are so icky they contaminate everything. That’s his problem, not society’s. Note he is also apparently claiming there is something magical about gay marriage since it bothers his magical sky buddy. It’s the 21st century, arguments based on magic belong in the Middle Ages.
7. It has threatened our family’s religious freedom in countless ways, as I explain here.
OK, I’m not going to listen to a 30 minute YouTube rant that will be entirely about distressed privilege. IE it will be an attempt to rebrand religious discrimination as religious freedom.
If I thought about it more, I’m sure I could develop a longer list. But the fact is, yes David, my own marriage has been adversely impacted (as I said twice on your show), and yet my love for my wife and my relationship with her remains faithful and unchanged.”
His last line pretty much destroys his own argument. As a lawyer will ask if you want to sue someone for ruining your life: They will ask if your wife still loves you and your kids still hug you when you come home? If the answer is yes to both, then your life isn’t ruined. Or your marriage in his case. His marriage is apparently just fine, so where is the harm to it from marriage equality? His whole rant is pretty much an illustration of what is so fucked up about ideological and religious thinking, they start with a conclusion and then search for evidence that supports their conclusion. So when the conclusion is nonsense, such as “Gay marriage will hurt my marriage,” the “evidence” is going to be nonsense as well. As the good chaplain has been so obliging to come up with and publish.
As I have said before and will no doubt say again, if you think about, let alone have concerns about what consenting adults are doing with their genitals, you are the pervert with issues.
(The above image is used entirely without permission and is even hard to come up with a good Fair Use rational. It’s not being used for profit though, and the Simpsons has been an outspoken advocate of marriage equality, so hopefully Matt Groening won’t object. Today for a change I’ll conclude with some visual humour:
Hope everyone is having a great weekend! Oh, and I didn’t even address the chaplains contention that gay marriage hurts national security, because, well, that’s so fuctarded stupid that it deserves no rebuttal.)
The Chick-Fil-A Controversy
Well, once again I am at odds with some of my progressive friends. Maybe all of them, I don’t know. And this visual distributed by the National Organization for Marriage Equality pushed me over the edge, I just had to post about this controversy. Don’t get me wrong, I think any two consenting adults should be able to get married; as has been demonstrated in court any times, the only objections to gay marriage are religious in nature. This means they aren’t objections, they are bigotry. Theists don’t want to hold gay wedding ceremonies in their church, no problem. They want their religious beliefs mandated by public law, big problem.
Moving right along, this graphic is a wonderful example of tortured logic. How, exactly, does a chicken restaurant offend a community’s sense of morality and fairness? It doesn’t of course, so the comparison to strip clubs and porn shops is both misleading and odious. What people are upset about is that the owners of the Chick-Fil-A chain contribute to causes that many people find offensive. Illegal causes? Well, no. Is the Chick-A-Fil chain illegally discriminating against anyone? Again, well, no. So basically the Chick-A-Fil chain is run by people whose political opinions are unpopular with some. Great, boycott them, picket them, complain about them on line. Heck, why not just don’t let them have a business permit to operate in a city where they aren’t welcome, why shouldn’t the mayors of Chicago and Boston refuse business permits to Chick-Fil-A?
Because it’s illegal, it’s unconstitutional, and it’s wrong. Yes, the owners of Chick-Fil-A give money to causes some people find offensive. They are exercising what the old people call … freedom. It used to be important to progressives, sometimes now I wonder. Yes, in America people are free to express whatever opinion they want, no matter how offensive, and the government is forbidden, by the constitution, from stopping them. It’s in the very first amendment, and there was a reason it is in the first amendment, because it’s fucking important. Please though, don’t take my word for it, here’s what Susan Bloch, a professor of constitutional law, had to say on the topic: “If they’re complying with laws, but as an institution espousing political beliefs, there’s a constitutional problem with the government withholding benefits from them based on a political stance.” I note though that since this news broke, the mayors of both cities have waffled and backed off some. No doubt because they got an email from their legal staff saying “Um, boss … you can’t really do that.”
Or to look at it from another perspective, if a mayor could deny a business permit based on the political stance of the business owner … business permits could be (and would be) denied routinely over whatever a mayor found objectionable. Mayors could basically decide what businesses could or could not operate in their city. Maybe some people don’t have a problem with that, but I do. And the courts and the ACLU are on my side. Living in a free country means that there will be people who have opinions that many other people find loathsome. It’s a price of freedom, and one I am happy to pay. Don’t like, it … as I said earlier: boycott Chick-Fil-A, picket them, write letters to the editor. What people can’t do, is use the power of the state to discriminate against them. Which is at the root of this whole marriage thing to start with, churches using the power of the state to sanction their idea of marriage.
Basically NOMEUSA thinks it’s OK for the government to do to the owners of Chick-Fil-A what they decry having done to gays. I guess because their cause is “just,” it’s OK? Sadly I’m seeing this sort of attitude more and more coming from the left, the idea that since they are right, anything goes. It’s an attitude that used to be confined to Fundies and the far right, now it seems increasingly common across the board. Or maybe I’m just noticing it more, in either case it scares me. It scares me because throughout history that’s how leaders have manipulated people into following them, and once people are convinced that their side has the moral high ground, they can be convinced to do anything, no matter how heinous.
Am I claiming that gay marriage is heinous? Of course not, I’m decrying the idea that “anything goes” since my side has the moral high ground. It’s not exactly an attitude conducive to debate and compromise. And, frankly, this attitude is why so many progressive Americans are now supporting our imperialistic, violent, and intensely misogynistic foreign policy. That’s for another blog post though.
“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” —Voltaire
(The above image is all over Facebook so I’m assuming its been released into the Public Domain. If not, I’m claiming it as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit, and the graphic above is the topic of this blog post, let alone being central to it. Credit and copyright, if it exists: NOMEUSA.)
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