The Republicans — eager to avoid any mention of Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, and skyrocketing American casualties overseas — are now beating the “Gay Marriage Must Be Stopped” drum, harder than ever.
As a result, more and more fundamentalists are finding their way to MadeByMark’s entries concerning gay marriage. A few even manage to operate the comment feature. Some observations:
1) Buy a dictionary. Fundamentalist Sunday schools should consider teaching spelling, punctuation, and grammar. I make the occasional typo myself … but come on, people.
2) “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” was cute when it was first said back in 1967. Forty years later, it’s wittiness is a bit worn down.
3) When your preacher tells you, “Marriage is a biblically ordained relationship between a man and a woman,” he’s lying.
Marriage is a civil union which the United States allows churches to administer. Want proof? Right now, today, you can get married by a Justice of the Peace without the involvement of any religious organization at all.
On the other hand, if your church “marries” you without filling out the right forms, your “marriage” will not be considered legal or legitimate by the state.
Assign all the religious mumbo-jumbo to marriage you like … but, in the end, in America, it’s a civil contract, pure and simple.
4) Your preacher is right about one thing: marriage is under attack … but not by homosexuals. Marriage has long been under attack by people who undermine its permanance by seeking divorce … but since when does wanting more of something amount to an attack on it?
Now, marriage is also under attack by those who want to forbid it to others for strictly religious reasons. There’s just one problem: in America, we have freedom of religion. It’s not up to you … or the government … to tell me what God thinks about the institution of marriage. Our nation’s founders gave me the right to decide for myself what I think God thinks about my desire to marry my partner. (God’s fine with it, by the way. She told me herself.)
5) Any strategy forbidding gay marriage that is rooted in religious beliefs is anti-American, and must be struck down. As long as my practice of my religion doesn’t keep you from practicing yours, I can do what I please, religiously. As long as my desire to be married doesn’t keep you from getting married (or from preaching whatever you like about marriage), then I should be able to do as I please about marriage.
6) I’m for gay marriage. An alarming number of fundamentalists suffer from a bizarre reading impairment. They can read a post like this one and respond with, “Thank God you’re involved in keeping marriage out of the hands of those nasty homosexuals.”
Sigh.
I’m open to any honest debate about this issue … but one does wish that, occasionally, fundamentalists would realize that quoting their preacher does not an argument make.
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