Conservative Principles Support Marriage Equality

So I wonder why so many conservatives are against marriage equality?  The single most common thing I hear from conservatives, particularly Tea Party conservatives, is that they are the defenders of liberty, freedom and the constitution.  Given those criteria the freedom of someone to have the liberty to marry the person of their choice should be right in their wheel house.  Conservatives love to quote the founding fathers, so let’s start there.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,  that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

A quote I’m sure you recognize from the Declaration of Independence, written and signed by the aforementioned founding fathers of our country.  Of course, it can easily be said these men were being hypocrites, the idea is nice but the practice that followed was that all white men were created equal, women and non-whites to the back of the bus please.  However I like to think that maybe the founding fathers were idealist who hoped that someday our country would rise to the level of these lofty ideals.

In fact, in many ways we have, we’ve come very far from the 1700’s, women and non-whites can vote, they enjoy generally equal rights in our society.  This is not to say sexism and racism don’t exist or have an impact, but certainly we have progressed in the last two hundred plus years.

The Constitution itself is silent on any discussion of marriage, but the document, particularly through the first ten amendments, seems to lay down a pretty consistent idea with the Declaration of Independence and that idea is that people are equal and should be treated fairly.  As such they should be free to express their ideas and religion they follow, be free from an oppressive government, excessive punishments and bailments.  My favorite amendment has always been the ninth amendment, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” 

So as defenders of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the principles of the founding fathers, conservatives should support an issue that at its heart is an expression of freedom and equality!

I could stop this piece here but I know inevitably I will hear the argument, disingenuous as it is that conservatism and Christian religious belief are tied together as America is a Christian nation.  Even though the documents referenced above clearly state you are free to practice any religion you would like, hardly a Christian ideal as doing so would condemn you to hell.   Here is an interesting piece on the subject, Why the US is not and has never been a Christian Nation.

The reason I can so easily dismiss this remark on the issue of marriage equality is simply that conservatives have never viewed marriage as a Christian or even a religious idea for that matter.  Oh sure it’s been great rhetoric in recent years and Bush the second even tried to get a one man, one woman amendment supported, but in fact the actions of both Christians and Conservatives clearly show marriage is not the Christian religious issue they pretend it is.  How can I say this, well if they thought it was a Christian issue then why haven’t they opposed Jewish, Hindu, or Muslim marriage? Ok, so maybe it’s just a religious issue, not a Christian thing.  If so, why haven’t conservatives and Christians been out there fighting vehemently against the right for Atheists to be married?  Have you ever heard of a single state where there was significant political opposition to Atheists getting married?  Of course you haven’t, because at the end of the day marriage equality is not a political or religious issue, its bigotry.

It completely parallels the opposition to interracial marriage also an issue of bigotry.  I have heard since I was a child that God is love, almost always from highly religious Christians, yet I don’t see a whole lot of Christian love on this issue.  So given that the idea of marriage equality follows conservative principles and is so clearly not a Christian or religious issue, I have to ask the following question.

Where are my conservative brothers and sisters, why isn’t the Tea Party out in full defense of the idea of marriage equality waving rainbow-colored flags of support?  Hey you can even paint the background of your Obama is a Socialist signs in rainbow colors and kill two birds with one stone! ~ ZD Blue

Conservatives against Capitalism & Freedom: Chick-Fil-A vs The Muppets

In case you’ve been living under a rock over the last week the president of the restaurant chain Chick-Fil-A came out with a statement that the chain supports the idea of  “traditional marriage“.   This was met by the expected reactions by liberals and those who support the LBGT community of condemnation and talks of boycotting the chain.  A quick side note, one thing that has always bugged me about Chick-Fil-A is that it’s pronounced chick filet, when clearly the way it’s written it should be pronounced chick fill uh, a much less sophisticated name.  This is not really all that newsworthy as these type of things seem to happen with some regularity and not all that unexpectedly from a restaurant chain primarily situated throughout the bible belt.

However what really kicked this whole thing up to another level was when the Jim Henson company came out against Chick-Fil-A and their bigoted stance.  That’s right, even the Muppets are against Chick-Fil-A, when you’ve lost the moral high ground to puppets you really are in a bad place.  There are of course now lots of protests and protest responses occurring, there is a national support day on August 1st and a corresponding same sex kiss day.

As Conservatives are always quick to point out, the restaurant is a private entity and has the absolute right to support financially or otherwise the anti-gay marriage agenda.  However what I find funny is how up in arms Conservatives get that people are exercising their right to protest this stance.  One of the primary conservative political planks is supposedly the support of freedom and capitalism.  Well, in a free capitalistic society people have the right to protest a company’s obvious bigotry by exercising their right to convince people not to spend money at that business.  Unfortunately what people on the edges of political belief, both left and right, always fail to recognize, is that your opposition has the same exact rights that you do.

To me the saddest thing about the anti-gay marriage stance, is that to any person of reasonable intelligence can see the direction all of this is heading.  Like the civil rights movement of the 1960′s the equality of marriage movement will culminate in all people in the United States having the right to marry the people they love.  Being against that says three things about you. 

First, you are mired in an outdated world view that no longer makes any sense.  The biblical arguments against same-sex marriage are ridiculous.  The way the bible guides the lives of Christians has and will always be re-interpreted into modern times, for example, we no longer stone people to death for working on the sabbath.  Essentially you will soon find yourself on the wrong side of history.

Second, you don’t have a basic understanding of history or culture and you certainly have not spent time with the people in the LGBT community.  Yes that’s right they are people, not Gays, or deviants or any other term you want to use to dehumanize them, they are just people just like you.

Third, at the absolute core of it all you are against love.  You are in opposition of the idea that two people have the right to express their love for each other in the same way you do.  Basically you are denying them freedom, the same freedom you wave as a flag, the same freedom found in the Constitution of the United States of America.  So at the end of the day, opposing Gay Marriage, is basically un-American.

Anti-Bullying rules show the hypocrisy of adults, what about equality?

Ok, before the darts start to fly and people comment without reading this post let me say in the very first line, bullying is bad, mkay.  No one should be subject to physical or mental abuse simply because of who they are.  I was a thin, short boy, with one of the first divorce families in a pretty tough neighborhood.  I took my fair share of abuse and without a doubt as kids will do, shit rolled downhill and there were people I wasn’t very nice to either.

Back when I was growing up, the mid-70′s, being gay, particularly for a young man was not acceptable.  Doubly if you were effeminate, and there were a couple of guys that suffered for that in my neighborhood as children.  It was wrong, we were all guilty of participating and it certainly has had long-term effects on these men.  One, seems to have adjusted well, is openly out and pretty successful.  The other, not so much, although I haven’t heard much in the last ten years, his life certainly wasn’t following the trajectory he had hoped for as a child.  Let this piece serve as a venue for a very public apology, especially to you Robert for the way I treated you as a child.

The world today is a more sensitive place.  Children are being made aware of bullying as are parents and educators.  Cyberbullying has gotten an incredible amount of attention after several teens committed suicide over the last couple of years after being bullied.  This is all good, unfortunately it doesn’t address the real source of bullying, the values put into the children (or lack thereof) by their parents.  Like racism or any other form prejudice, if what a child is hearing at home are things like, I can’t believe you let a fag beat you.   Well then, what do you expect that child is going to do at school when he/she encounters an effeminate or openly gay male student?  At the end of the day, until we change the values parents teach to their children, change will be slow in coming.

On the news the other day I was listening to a news story about all of the rules that are being put in place against bullying, cyberbulling and the use of language.  A lot of this has been especially focused on how LGBT students are treated.  However there is a signficant hypocrisy that exists at the core of all of this.  We tell our children that they are not to make fun of gay students for being gay, that in fact, gay students are no different from heterosexual students.  Then as a society in general we deny them the right to be married just like heterosexual members of society.  So what is it people, is a gay person the same as a heterosexual person, or should it be ok to bully them and treat them differently?  Because right now the answer in America is treat them like any other person until they are an adult, then you can discriminate against them with impunity.

Equality, Racism and Gay Marriage

We live in a very different America than the one I was born into, I guess that would be true for all of us, but the year of my birth, 1964, was a significant year for another reason, it was the year the Civil Rights Act became law.  This law ended segregation, it made great leaps in removing some of the mechanisms people used to keep blacks and illiterate whites from voting particularly in the south.  It didn’t eliminate voter discrimination but it went a long way in giving blacks more access to the democratic process.  It has always seemed unbelievable to me that the concepts of racial integration and equal access to voting have only been the law for the length of my lifetime, less than 50 years. 

Even more disconcerting is that anti-miscegenation laws were only repealed by the Supreme Court in 1967.  It is hard to imagine that laws against inter-racial marriage persisted in this country even three years after the Civil Rights Act, and if it weren’t for a Virginia court case may have stayed on the books much longer.   A really sad statement on the way our country thinks and operates. 

On the upside, America did pass the Civil Rights Act and we did repeal the miscegenation laws and over the 47 years of my life race relations have improved in this country.  We have not eliminated racism, far from it, but we have made progress and yes, including having a president of African-American descent.  President Obama’s election makes the standard American Dream, that anyone can be present, an equivalent lie to children of both white and black families.

Even with the progress we have made on race relations, one segment of our society remains openly discriminated against, homosexuals.  The Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Transgender (LGBT) community faces open discrimination in many ways in our society but what I want to talk about today is the refusal to give people in this community the right to marry the people they love.  People put forward a lot of reasons why this shouldn’t happen; they need to protect “traditional” marriage, that marriage is a religious ceremony and God hates homosexuals, that same sex marriage will lead to polygamy or even the right to marry animals, and finally that this will lead to “gay” education in the schools.  None of these arguments hold water and most have been addressed in a piece called, “10 Bad Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage.”

Now I think most thinking humans would find the arguments against inter-racial marriage ridiculous in this day and age.  We think wow, how unsophisticated they were to prohibit people of different races to marry.  The interesting thing is that many of the arguments used to support why inter-racial marriage shouldn’t be allowed, are the same arguments being used to prohibit gay marriage as outlined in a piece on the arguments for traditional marriage.  So I have a feeling our great grandchildren, will look back at us, in the same way we look back on our great grandparents and wonder what the hell were they thinking?

So let’s not let that happen, let’s clear one of the last major hurdles to true equality in America and grant equal access to marriage and maybe our great grandchildren will say wow, our great grandparents got it right.