California Voters to Weigh in on Gay Marriage
Way back in May, I posted to a blog elsewhere on the internet titled, "CA Victory Begins Rights Retention Struggle." The main content of that post was as follows:
So, it has hit the news again! Yet another state has joined the bandwagon in allowing gay marriage and large groups of conservatives are in search of the gay meme anti-virus, getting ready for their counter-strike. These people suffer tremendously when gay marriage becomes legalized in a new area, but not for the reasons they seem to think. Being gay, unbeknownst to them, does not seem contagious (at least such evidence cannot be found in any study I have ever heard of). Yet, the protesters will raise their hackles and gear up for another campaign to deny others the rights that they already have. There are great deals of things that this topic tends to send reeling through my head like a little electronic hedgehog on a screen in my brain. Firstly, I think that most people who protest gay marriage have a serious misunderstanding about human sexuality. They often see it as dichotomized, or they tend to be in complete denial that there should be anything in existence beyond two sexes and two gender preferences. As a result, when evidence of some sexual variety shows up, they object, deny, and shit enough bricks to make the yellow brick road indistinguishable from their puritanical road to cognitive dissonance. The truth is, their reactions can hurt them and many more than just the gays and lesbians that they are so offended about getting to have some legally binding social contract that grants them all the benefits regarding a loved one that any married couple tends to have. Primarily when I think of this, I am thinking of all the people who aren't necessarily gay or lesbian but who constitute the other types of human sexuality. I think of the intersexed - people who are born with two sets of sex organs, who have genitals inconsistent with their chromosomes or whose chromosomes don't even fall into the XX or XY pattern. I think of all the people that these conservatives want to pretend don't exist and how the laws that are proposed to prevent gay marriage hurt them as well. This also makes me think about all the people who have to sit in the waiting room when a loved one suffers a terrible physical trauma, the ones who are denied the chance to sit by the side of their companion when they are most needed, or the ones who are denied tax benefits or health benefits or property rights all because someone thinks that it is their right to blot out the ability for others to be happy and have the things that they need. A few other points in this rant of mine: 1) Gay marriage existed for thousands of years before Conservatives did in the US or elsewhere on the planet. 2) Marriage is a social contract and is not based on the Bible or some Judeo-Christian invented norm. You can be free to have your religious view of marriage, but to deny others their view which may have roots farther back in history than your own tradition is absurd. 3) There is no objective evidence to suggest that homosexuality has itself harmed anyone, therefore, there seems to be no rational reason to target it and create victims using the law.
Just as I had predicted, the fight for these rights has continued and will be voted on in Proposition 8 on November. The amazing thing is that people don't seem to realize how their prejudices are seriously harming other people. One plea after another has been made to try to gain equality for homosexuals (and bisexuals and any variety of sexual preference involving consenting adults) and yet, people are still so astonishingly closed minded and cemented into their own worldviews, no matter how much evidence we present to them, they continue to try to take these rights from people, even going so far as to assume that they have the right to control the rights of others in an advertisement called, "YES on Proposition 8 (Prop 8) your rights" Fortunately, the flaws in that ad campaign is easy to see and was pointed out in the following video response where the only thing that the creators did was replace references to "same-sex marriage" with "interracial" in order to expose the fallacies and lies that the original video presented:
Other great comments about this video can be found at skepchick and BadAstronomy. Thanks to all the people who put forth the effort to create this video!
