So, it’s finally happened. Gays and lesbians are lining up to get married in city halls all across California. This pleases me for two reasons. First of all, it pisses off stupid people: morons all the way from bigoted Baptist ministers right up to President Douchebag himself, and as a general principal anything that offends President Douchebag is just the tops in my book. But on a more sober note, I do feel that this is a sign of significant social progress. I feel that for each state government that acknowledges that there is no foundation to deny same sex couples the same joint tax status as male-female couples, America makes another important step towards returning to respectability on the global social scene.
America really needs this. I’m tired of having to flee from mobs armed with rotten fruit every time I try to travel abroad. Now I can say that at least 2 percent of my nation’s government is actually kind of open minded. California is probably the first state to give in to the implacable current of history, much in the same way that the controversy of inter-racial marriage that raged a half century ago has become as casual in today’s culture as peanut butter and jelly.
I have always supported the rights of gays and lesbians to marry each other. Not just because I am open-minded, but because I know that if the gays and lesbian community fight hard enough they will win this one. To go back to the issue of inter-racial marriages, let us assume for the sake of argument that you are morally opposed to this; given that it is still utterly inconceivable to pervert the existing interpretation of the constitution in such a way as to say blacks and whites cannot be legally married to each other. Of course, things were different in the 1950’s, and here in the year of our lord 2008 it would be anathema to publicly take such a position. But still they did. And in addition to being intolerably narrow-minded, it was completely and utterly quixotic of them. I can’t even imagine the eternal shame of having your name forever be an obstacle feebly trying to prevent what future generations would consider to be a basic civil liberty.
There is no more intelligent an argument to ban gay and lesbian marriages than there is for banning inter-racial marriages, and if the opponents to gay marriage had any brains they would give it up for the sake of their immortal reputations. And yet, despite having no good reasons, the opponents cling chiefly to two very stupid reasons. The first reason is that the Bible says that it is opposed to same sex marriages…somewhere apparently. I have never been able to find out where, exactly, but I believe President Douchebag when he says it is there. I believe him because it is easier than looking myself and I don’t need to be able to prove that it isn’t actually there to be able to prove that it is a stupid argument. All I need to do is point out that the first amendment (which is an unusually important amendment) guarantees freedom from religious oppression. Specifically it says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Meaning if I believe that a marriage can take place between two men the government has no grounds to cite the Bible as a reason for banning it. In fact the very idea of President Douche Bag’s proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage federally completely flies in the face of why the constitution was drafted in the first place.
Fact: In the history of the Constitution there have been only two amendments that have banned things. The first prohibited the manufacture and consumption of alcohol, and we all know how that panned out. The other banned the sale and ownership of slaves, which is a ban that most progressive and urbane Americans still support 130 or so years after its inception. Amendments largely establish freedoms. We need to do this because the rights that seem implicit to us here in the year of our lord 2008, over the course of history, apparently had to be carved into bedrock; women’s suffrage for instance. So, traditionally, adding amendments to the Constitution is a process of establishing rights, not curtailing them.
The second reason, which is even stupider than the first, is that people fear that same-sex marriages will pervert the idea of marriage. I have heard it argued that if we allow same sex marriage, then how far are we from allowing people to marry their pets, or their cars, or something equally stupid. When I hear this one I have to find a way to thwart the reflex to whack them with a rolled up New Yorker. A person cannot marry a car because marriage is a legal contract, and a car cannot legally engage in a contract. If the marriage between a man and a car were ever contested in court, the judge would have no choice but to annul the marriage on the grounds that the car was not mentally competent when it signed the marriage license.
There is nothing implicitly wrong with same-sex marriage. The worst that can be said about it is that it might be conceived as being unseemly or off-putting by heterosexuals but I would argue that gay sex is no more unseemly then your average gay marriage opponent (Rush Limbaugh, I’m looking in your direction, you bloated, pill-popping hypocrite).
I don’t want to put my frustration entirely on the heads of folks like Rush Limbaugh and President Douchebag. In fact there are thousands of folks out there eager to wind up on the losing end of social progress. So, in the interest of proving that these people don’t share half of a brain between them, I have come up with a half-baked argument against allowing same-sex marriages. While I don’t fear men marrying their cars, it has recently occurred to me that I would be willing to support an initiative that banned a man’s right to marry his mother. Who is with me on this one? Everyone? Okay, you don’t have to speak up if you don’t want to, but I would be willing to bet the farm that if you talked to the average Tom, Dick or Harry on the street you could make their face turn bluish-white by speaking in earnest about marrying your own mother.
What is interesting is that really, if you think about it, there is nothing implicitly wrong with a man marrying his own mother, except of course for the fact that it is the single most egregious crime against nature conceived by human imagination. Seriously, if anyone disagrees please speak up, but I would be willing to lead a charge against history itself in order to keep people from marrying their mothers.
What is my reason for my position? It’s just plain sick, that’s why. Why is it sick? Because…because of Oedipus. But wait—is basing a position on what happens in a two thousand-year-old Greek myth any more solid a foundation than the word of the Bible? No, this is no good. There must be a reason why gay marriage is acceptable and mother-son marriage is not.
Actually, there is something implicitly wrong with incestuous marriage, it leads to birth defects. I won’t go into the genetics at play, only that it causes weak recessive genes to proliferate resulting in unwanted traits emerging in the offspring of incestuous conceptions. But unfortunately, this is also not a reason to ban mother-son marriages. If it were, we would also have to ban diabetics from marrying each other, or carriers of the hemophilia trait. Furthermore, just try telling a deaf husband and wife that they are not to risk bearing deaf offspring.
So, I’m actually stumped on this one. I still support gay marriage because I feel to not do so is stupid. I guess being an open-minded kind of guy, I engaged in this sort of exercise in order to appreciate how someone can look at the idea of gay marriage with such horror. Is it any more ridiculous for me to thwart a mother and son who claim to be in love while not appreciating that someone can hold the same viewpoint about two men who are in love?
Actually, I could use some resolution on this issue before I myself get trampled under the implacable current of history on the mother-son marriage issue.
I guess the bottom line is that the only reason why mother-son marriage is something that I oppose is because I feel it is an abomination. Which is the same reason why opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage. And while I will not tolerate the intolerance that would deny the happiness of a group as numerous and significant as gays and lesbians, I can at least say that to a small degree I understand where they are coming from, even though they are all a bunch of ass backwards morons.
By “they” I mean the opponents, not the gays.
