I'm pro-gay marriage, and anyone who disagrees with me is evil.
The debate over gay marriage has raged for several years now, with new laws or new bans garnering mass media attention. As a California resident (and more specifically, a South Bay resident) I’m in close enough proximity to the “gay capital” of San Francisco for this to be a persistent and important issue. In fact,
a challenge to the recently-passed Prop 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California six months after a court decision legalized it, has already been accepted by a federal court. Though not a personal issue for me (I don’t have any close friends or family who are gay), I still feel that the denial of marriage equality is an important and often undervalued issue; it receives plenty of media attention, but in fifty years, when it has been legalized for decades, we will wonder how we could have thought it was a sin.
Basically, I feel that gays are the new blacks: a large minority which is openly discriminated against (not just in the marriage arena, but also in regard to the armed forces and in social situations), a slap in the face of the Constitution and the provisions which are not supposed to “make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (14th Amendment).
In other words, we are not supposed to infringe upon the privileges or liberties of our citizens without due process of law (this is why felons can’t vote; they’ve already had their due process). Marriage is a privilege and a liberty which gay people cannot enter into on their own terms despite not having been charged with any offense. Gays can marry members of the opposite sex, of course, but that precludes them from being able to marry and support the person they love (which is kind of the point of marriage), while affording that right to straight people. That’s discrimination, pure and simple, and it’s a pretty clear violation of the Constitution.
This issue is also one of the few where I feel the opposition is just
wrong. Typically I can understand the position of others; you don’t want socialized medicine because it can lead to bureaucratic inefficiency and fewer exemplary hospitals. I understand that. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it. However, I think that gay marriage opponents are entirely wrong, and typically fall into one of three categories: the bigot, the idiot, and the hypocrite.
The BigotThe Bigot is easy to spot. This is the one who is against gay marriage for the same reason he’s against being gay: it’s wrong, evil, sinful, subhuman, inferior, or whatever. This guy is typically also an idiot and an Idiot, but his bigotry overrides that (and being an Idiot is not a requirement). He just plain doesn’t like gay people or the gay lifestyle or gay anything, even used with the meaning “happy”. He’s also difficult to reason with or persuade; the best method of dealing with him is probably giving up, because he’s not going to change his views for anyone except Jesus. And Jesus coming back to tell him what an idiot he is probably a long shot.
This category is also the reason I say that gays are the new blacks. Fifty years ago, this guy was The Racist, who didn’t want his kids going to school with black kids, didn’t want blacks marrying whites, didn’t want blacks to have anything other than a step up from slavery (and would likely go back to that if he could). That is an extreme, of course (but it does exist, for both gays and blacks), and there are varying levels of the Bigot, from the absolute hatred to the mild dislike to the guy who is fine with gays, he just doesn’t want them to marry each other (this still falls under the category of the Bigot, as there is no rationale behind the stance, just a belief that gays shouldn’t get married because they’re gay, or because “marriage is between a man and a woman”, which is discrimination).
The IdiotThe Idiot is slightly less obvious than the bigot, and slightly easier to reason with. The most common example of this is the “Gay marriage shouldn’t be legalized because being gay is a choice” which
many people will tell you is incorrect. This is a popular position, which surprises me quite a bit. It seems like it could be easily solved by finding a gay person and asking them. There’s really no reason to lie, unless they’ve all cooked up a vast conspiracy and falsified data to convince everyone that being gay isn’t a choice, and therefore argue that banning gay marriage is discrimination. It also seems that straight people could ask themselves: “Did I choose to be straight?” to which the answer would very likely be “No” and therefore extrapolate that gays also did not choose to be gay. There are some gays who say that being gay is a choice, but they are a minority, and several studies which I can’t find seem to contradict that idea.
Therefore, given the consensus in the gay community that being gay is not a choice, the backup from SCIENCE! on this idea, and the fact that there seems to be a correlation between “Being gay is a choice” believers and being religious (which tends to lead to dogmatic belief over malleable theory), it’s safe to say that this argument can be put to rest, and call those who still believe it Idiots.
There are plenty of others who fall into the Idiot category, of course, and plenty more who straddle the line between Bigot and Idiot. “Marriage is between a man and a woman” straddles the line. It combines an ignorance of history (many non-Western cultures accept or accepted homosexuality and several pre-Christian Western cultures, such as the Romans and Greeks, accepted homosexuality) and law (marriage to the state is a contractual union, and therefore should not be subject to the participants’ gender) with the idea that people who want to marry members of the same sex are breaking some sort of natural law and are therefore “wrong”.
There is a sort of subgroup here, the Ignoramuses, the difference being that they simply haven’t seen the research or talked to the people, and therefore are uninformed rather than stupid. However, in my opinion those who decide to believe something without taking the time to question its validity (at which point you would discover the research and the people) are stupid. Believing in something stupid is just as stupid as believing in something smart without a reason.
Like I said, many Bigots are also Idiots (though their bigotry is infinitely more dangerous; sometimes an Idiot who is actually an Ignoramus can be persuaded through the use of facts and logic), though the two don’t have to occur together. When they do, it is typically much more difficult to reason with them; climbing a wall of stupid is hard enough without continuously being knocked off with outright hate.
The HypocriteThe Hypocrite is the hardest group to convince, mostly because they’re already sure of their own tolerance. And they are typically tolerant. Of course, tolerant means “can put up with,” a definition that is a long way from acceptance, which is more along the lines of “to think of as normal”. Acceptance is the ultimate goal here; there is no reason why a gay person should be in any way incapacitated or even inconvenienced due to their sexuality. But the Hypocrite hasn’t quite taken that leap yet.
Instead, they are typically focused on one of
these reasons, though other arguments are brought up. I need not repeat any of the anti-gay marriage arguments given in that piece, nor the excellent reasons why they are crap. Most of the Hypocrite’s arguments are not focused on the idea that being gay is morally wrong or even unnatural (unlike the Bigot or the Idiot, who typically believe that there is something inherently wrong with being gay); as I said, they are tolerant of gays. They simply believe that gay marriage will result in undesirable consequences, without stopping to realize that all of these consequences have already occurred through the various forms heterosexual relationships can take.
This is why they’re a Hypocrite: they profess tolerance (usually) and claim they have nothing against gays, yet are clearly willing to break the rules for heterosexuals and not for homosexuals. That is hypocrisy, pure and simple, and the practice of it is resulting in discrimination. What’s worse is that the people who do it typically don’t even see it as discrimination, just an attempt to avoid certain outcomes; in this way, they are possibly even more dangerous than the Bigot, who is typically too stupid to convince anyone not indoctrinated into the idea that being gay is wrong, or the Idiot, who is also perfectly willing to openly discriminate against gays. The Hypocrite, on the other hand, will smile to your face and stab you in the back. Whether consciously or unconsciously (more likely the latter), the Hypocrite discriminates, and unconscious discrimination may be the worst kind.
I’ve presented this argument to a number of people, at least one of whom is quite a bit smarter than me, and none of them could get around it. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have holes, but I feel these three groupings encompass nearly every person who is against gay marriage and systematically refutes each of them.
I should note that while I believe gay marriage should be legalized throughout the country (and truly, the world), I realize that not everyone is going to agree with me just because I can present a logical argument (especially not the Bigots) and I have run across people who are perfectly fine with being defined as a Bigot, and will cling to their position. They accept being a Bigot, which I find distasteful, but hey, it’s their life (until it starts to affect other people’s lives).
Anyway, though I feel this system is mostly complete, I’d like to hear what you guys can come up with to try and poke holes in it, or otherwise amend it. My goal is to get this as nearly bulletproof as possible so when those damned Christian conservatives come back I can continuously laugh at their idiocy.