Last week this divisive and so-called
"Marriage Protection Amendment" was
advanced out of committee in the Pennsylvania House to allow for a full House vote.
It's not too late to contact your legislators and discourage them from supporting this biased and negative Amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution. They need to hear from us! They need to hear from us each and everyday until either the Religious-Wrong is silenced, or this measure is dead! Call and tell your rep that as a constituent you do NOT support this attempt to add discriminatory language to Pennsylvania's Constitution.
This fight is far from over!
I would encourage you to add this verbiage to contacts. It is the quote from Jamie Raskin. This is what Jamie said on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 before the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee in response to a question from Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs about whether marriage discrimination against gay people is required by "God's Law."
"Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You didn't place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."
In my opinion, this really gets to the root of the debate on gay marriage. Weather the Evangelical members of the Religious-Wrong wish to admit it or not, their faith is the only real reason they are pushing this agenda on America.
Their agenda has nothing to do with fears for marriage, families, or the supposed failure of our American society & culture. This is about bigotry hidden behind God and the Bible.
Not once do you hear a legitimate and logical articulation of the impact to any of the aforementioned by allowing LGBT Americans to marry? One can only conclude in the absence of reason, and in the presence of a wealth of empty rhetoric that as I have said over and over this proposed Amendment, and all like it, are about blind hate and nothing more.
And that just goes to show how little these fringe Christians know about their own faith!
Christianity is supposed to be about love. That is what I learned in Sunday School. I was taught that God is love! Supporting love through understanding, compassion, and charity those were among the strongest messages of Jesus. Unfortunately for us, and the fabric of America, many faithful have lost their way, in much the same was the fundamentalist Muslim has lost his or her way from the true teachings of the Koran.
If only these citizens of our great nation could honestly look in the mirror and see how they are more similar than dissimilar to the agenda of the terrorists? Imagine what could be accomplished to the honor of our American ideals if they were able to see themselves as similar to, and not simply superior to other fundamentalist organizations? They stand from the pulpit and preach about a personal belief in evil that has nothing to do with God or Christianity, but everything to do with their ignorance and hate for a section of their own peers. They blindly lob accusations about me and my partner. They preach on how I am going to (hell if it exists), yet they ignore the fact they are judging me in place of God, and thereby condemning themselves to the hell they have planned for me. They are willing to dismiss all their sins in favor of electing mine the greatest threat to America. How foolish is this? What a waste of time and energy to make me and my partner of 14 years a "national priority?"
How is it they can't see the reality that they are the true "threat" to this nation? They are tearing down our legal system, our system of checks & balances, our proud system of religious equality for their own selfish reasons. Sounds like something the Taliban would do, no? Do they really believe that God will be happy they went on a crusade on His behalf? God doesn't believe in "Holy Wars," that is the business of men. That is the business of hate; the business of the ignorant and the left-behind.
As I told one commenter in the past, just because you keep repeating it over and over that "gays are a threat to the institution of marriage" doesn't make it true. Subscribing to the Bush/Cheney school of rhetoric where you are taught that if you say it over and over again, it will eventually happen is not only shortsighted, it points to your base ignorance of the facts of law, culture, and faith as it relates to marriage. Just like George won't find WMD's by telling us over and over they are in Iraq, you won't find threats to marriage simply by saying over and over again that they exist.
Keep fighting the good fight my friends. We have the law, the American ideal of equality for all, and the Constitution on our side. The fringe will fail, as all extremists eventually do. But in the mean time, we need to keep focused, determined, and motivated to urge the support of our elected officials. It is our future they debate, and without our voices they are working with assumptions about us.
And you all know what they say about when you "assume?"
And as I am speaking of assumptions, I wish to address in advance those readers that are Christians and whom don't subscribe to the positions I have outlined above. First, welcome to the party! Your feelings of frustration are born of being unfairly generalized. I know first hand how that feels. What I say to you is what I say to other gay people. This debate is just like an "open mic" night at a comedy club. You have the power to participate in this debate and salvage your faith from those who may attempt to hijack it for their own gains!
But if you are silent and allow Pat Robertson and Rick Santorum to froth the microphone with hate and stories of gay tel-a-tubbies, then you are getting just what you deserve. You can only be stereotyped in this way if you allow it to happen. If you find the fundamentalist position repulsive, then do your part and tell the politicians that are listening to the repugs to listen to you too! Otherwise assumptions will rule the law until new ones are made to fact and old ones are exposed as lies. In any event, your silence equates to acceptance and approval; thereby you have no one to blame for collective generalizations about your faith then yourself.