I just can’t understand why over one thousand people would go out to a rally for the purpose of promoting discrimination against a group of people and supporting restriction upon their rights. The News and Observer reports:
More than 1,000 people, many from Baptist churches across the state, stood on the ice-covered lawn outside the Legislative Building on Tuesday to demand that state legislators give them a chance to vote on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
The rally was a follow-up to a news conference last week during which Republican legislators reintroduced a bill that would allow North Carolina to hold a referendum on defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman. North Carolina law prohibits same-sex marriage, but advocates of the constitutional amendment say they want extra protections should a judge decide the current law is unconstitutional.
Ok, we now know who, what ,when, but I’m still puzzled about why.
Two well-known conservative Christian commentators who spoke at the rally described a breakdown of society should gay couples be allowed to marry — including a rise in single-parent households and in the number of dependents wanting Social Security and health insurance benefits.
David Gibbs III, a lawyer who in 2005 fought to keep brain-damaged Terri Schiavo on life support, told rally participants gay marriage would “open the door to unusual marriage in North Carolina.
“Why not polygamy, or three or four spouses?” Gibbs asked. “Maybe people will want to marry their pets or robots.”
Ok, got it. They’re nuts.
There is belief among conservatives that homosexuals are being given ‘special rights’ when they are given equal protection under the law. The complete inability to separate Church and State that so dogs the modern fundamentalist Christian in America is partially responsible. Because the Bible says X, then the government should legislate X and X is often assumed to be official policy because it is not officially rebuked. When official policy attempts to officially rebuke X, then those who assumed X was de facto policy get up on their soap boxes to condemn the government for betraying its principles when what they really mean is that the government must follow their priniciples.
I don’t want to say the word ‘stupid’, but an intellectual disconnect is involved. Because Christian marriage is strictly male-female, the ‘right to marry’ is seen as referring exclusively to heterosexual relationships, so the right for a man to marry a man or a woman to marry a woman is a ‘special right’ not granted to the rest of the populace. There is no ability to understand the idea that, in the strict accordance of the Supreme Court definition of the right to marry, anyone is free to marry anyone they choose regardless of social convention because marriage is a civil right.
touche eclectic…
now.. how do we get the crazy religious folks to listen?
lol
Honestly, nomoreGOP, it has to work like all civil rights movements ultimately work.
The slow drip of cultural growth will eventually make human rights the mainstream and bigotry the minority, as it has with other civil rights issues. Racism and chauvinism are still real, but they are no longer ‘respectable’ or ‘mainstream.’ Today people are shocked by jokes that used to be socially acceptable.
This doesn’t mean we should stop fighting for human rights, because working for such rights is part of what causes cultural change. It does mean, however, we need to know what to expect.
Alexander Hamilton, after all, wanted to abolish slavery in 1776. It took a touch longer.
Fortunately younger voters tend to be more tolerant. Over time I expect first the blue states and ultimately the red states to overcome this bigotry. Unfortunately in some areas it might still take quite a while.
I live in Tennessee, near the Virginia border. Obama carried VA, though he lost TN by a huge margin. However, I can say with a great deal of satisfaction that there are a great many younger people, even in this part of the country, who are cosmopolitan Americans rather than rural Southern stereotypes. Many younger people are increasingly intellectual and increasingly pursue education, whether formal or simply by reading and listening.
So I do believe change is coming. I didn’t mean to imply that I did not.
I simply believe that it will take time and attrition.