Thursday, February 12, 2004

Looking at it from a different angle

In politics, as in everything else, you have to choose your battles carefully. Pick the right ones, and you gain a larger following; pick the wrong ones, and people think you're nuts.

Which brings me to this, which, in turn, makes me wonder... is everyone out of their damned mind?

Come on! What does this have to do with anything? Does it somehow diminish the love Bob1 has for Mary1 if some other guy in some other state loves some other guy who also is in some other state? Does it make Bob and Jane's marriage any less special, any less important? Of course not! So why the hell is everyone afraid of this? It makes no sense. Do people really stay awake at nights worried that two gay women (who, I might add, said people will likely never meet) will get married? That's insane -- that's like staring at a hurricane coming toward your house and suddenly realizing that you hate your neighbor's couch. It has no bearing on your life. None at all.

In the meantime, anti-gay-marriage advocates are looking like idiots. No, really. "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" Great. Pithy. Makes you sound like you have nothing better to do than to worry about the love lives of strangers. Let me ask you2 a question: what it were a man and a woman, but one was black and the other white? Would you still be against the marriage? Because like it or not, there are distinct similarities between the anti-gay movement and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The analogies are far from perfect -- there's no true segregation, for example -- but there are/were laws blocking both groups from doing things (get married, for instance) for no better reason than some arbitrary feature that someone didn't like. In the 60s, it was skin color; in the 2000s it's sexual orientation.

I'm not really a fan of anti-discrimination laws -- I don't think they work. Passing a law saying I have to like person X won't actually make me like the person; in fact it will probably make me resent the person for receiving special treatment. In the end, it'll be our children and our children's children who will make us get along with other people -- after all, when your child brings home a friend, and 20 years later that person (who is by now practically an adopted child to you and a sibling to your child) discovers that he/she is gay, are you really going to get that person out of your life? What if it means losing your child? For that matter, what if it was your child that is gay; would you really cut loose your own child?

But not being a fan of anti-discrimination laws does not by any means make me a fan of discrimination laws. Just because I don't think something should be made illegal does not mean that I believe that it should be made legal. Quite frankly, I don't think the government has any business dictating what should constitute a legal marriage within certain bounds3.

Quite frankly, we have better things to worry about. The left is steadily encroaching and turning us into a more socialist state every year, and we don't always help ourselves out by picking battles that a.) we can't win, and b.) don't really make any sense. Like it or not, gay marriage is, I believe, an inevitability. So let's accept it and move on to more important things. Pissing into the wind will help us not one whit.



1 Made up names; no basis in reality. I just needed an example.
2 And by "you" I mean "makers of the pithy slogans"
3 Specifically, I advocate marriage being defined as "any combination of consensual adults". Key words: "consensual" and "adults".

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