The LGBT gold rush was lost to the Dark Side as surely as the good guys will...eventually...win the marriage-equality struggle. Sure, it's plenty galling to hear those who live to limit marriage, adoption and related family issues hide behind a veil of false pro-family rhetoric. Yet, they got there first.
Those of us who actually want kids in healthy homes, loving couples in stable marriages, and, well if you pardon the cliché, stereotypical Christian ideals, are too late. Those who want to limit marriage, with all its responsibilities, obligations and privileges to one man and one woman, got the figurative trademark on pro-marriage. Those who want to see children in orphanages or bounced to often debilitating foster homes just so long as they are not with homosexual couples or singles were early to the game of self-describing as pro-family. Those who deny the lurid and abusive biblical scripture and history of polygamy, slavery, rape, incest, adultery, and murder for sexual ends to pretend that one-man/one-woman marriage is a millennia-long heritage, well, they're simply to ignorant, stupid, or dishonest to be believed.
Yet, these dishonorable sorts were cleverly quick to claim the memes. Pro-family and pro-marriage in particular for the very ones who are anti-family and anti-marriage is bittersweet.
Much like the homosexual evangelicals who squirm in pews of black churches that preach bigotry of "their kind," how hard it must be for the millions of Protestants who hear their alleged ministers of the gospel rail at them. Marriage is only for a man and a woman together. Sex is only for procreation. Adoption is failure of God's commands. IVF is sacrilegious.
Of course, these are the same clerics who are quick to forgive the sins of the Gingriches, the Clintons, the Palins, the millions of others who confess their shortcomings. Adultery? Fornication? Virtually the whole set of commandments? You're forgiven all...so long as you're not a queer or you don't approve of abortion.
It makes one weary.
As well as being fast to claim ownership of illogical terms, like pro-family and pro-marriage when you are the opposite, these same bozos like to pretend they are American and little-d democratic, when they are certainly not. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the let-the-people-vote/referendum/ballot-initiative shames.
Plainest here is that the referendum/initiative process that half the states have is a relic of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Then citizens in various states wanted ways to correct the abuses of corrupt legislators. Recently, these have become tools for well-financed special-interest groups and hate mongers to play on the emotions of voters. Lackaday.
The let-the-people-vote-on-the-rights-of-the-other mentality elides over quite a bit. There's that huge issue of our national tradition of not voting to hamper, harm and hinder the rights of any one group. More procedurally, there's that messy business of representative democracy; legislatures are charged with voting for us when a town-meeting style is too cumbersome and, well, ignorant to settle complex issues.
We as a state and together as a nation should stand and scream, "No!" whenever some hateful fools call to let the people vote on any group's rights.
The next post will be on the craziness of pretending that we don't have to stay on the inexorable path toward marriage equality because so many states have amended their constitutions to forbid it..
Tags: massmarrier, same sex marriage, marriage equality, pro-marriage, pro-family, ballot initiatives
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