Hate and Maine

Fear and hate won the day in Maine this past election day. And no matter what you say, that election was all about hate and keeping gays and lesbians from having their civil rights. I've seen the ads the anti gay marriage people ran in Maine and they are all fear based. They played on the uneducated and religious people's basest darkest fears. They used the fear of children being exposed to homosexual sex to scare people into voting to take away rights that they themselves already have.
And let's be honest here too, the gay marriage foes are against same sex marriage because their church tells them to be. It is written in their book of metaphors and fairy tales that it is evil for two dudes to kiss and love one another and it's horrible if two women make love with each other and have a stable loving home. Some guy chiseled that into a stone tablet back in the Bronze age so it must be true.

But people of reason and goodwill know it's not. And another thing we know is that if your religion and your church and your minister is against same sex marriage and extending civil rights to gays, lesbians, and transgendered folks then you are too . It doesn't matter if you say you're for same sex marriage, if your church is against it, then so are you. If you proclaim your love for gays and you say you want them to be able to get married, but if the religion you follow is against it, then so are you. If you are a Roman Catholic and you say, "I love teh gay! I want teh gays to get married!," but your church as a whole opposes same sex marriage and works to outlaw it, then you by your financial support, by your attendance, by your adherence to it's dogma, help keep those gays you claim to love from having marriage equality. Same goes if you're a United Methodist, a Presbyterian, a Sikh, a Muslim, a Seventh Day Adventist, a Scientologist, a what the fuck ever. If you really want to see gays get the right to marry then you need to stop supporting religious organizations that work their sanctimonious asses off to keep them from being equal.

Film director Paul Haggis put his money where his mouth was and he very publicly left the cult of Scientology over this issue. How many of you have left your church over it? How many of you pay lip service to loving gays and wanting gay marriage but still pay, through your donations, to keep gays separate and unequal?
But you know, having lived in the so called Bible belt for so many years amongst some of the most hypocritical people on earth when it comes to religion and sex, I can see how and why they hate gays so much. The born agains hate and fear gays because their Bible tells them to and because they are either uneducated or just plain ignorant. A former boss of mine, a reasonably intelligent woman with a college degree, once told me that she was glad that gays couldn't serve in the military because she was afraid if they were allowed to serve in the middle of battle those gays might be winking at other soldiers instead of trying to kill the enemy. And the sad truth is she's not the only one who thinks that gay people are some kind of hypersexed beasts who think of nothing but getting it on. When you hear someone claim they don't their kids around homos, it's a good bet they think that somehow gays can't control themselves sexually around anyone, especially kids.

While I can see why people who believe that witches are real and that the earth is only a little over 6000 years old hate gays and want to keep them from having the same freedoms and rights that straight people have, there is one group who's opposition to same sex marriage baffles me and that group is black people who lived through the Jim Crow years. If anyone would know what it feels like to be a second class citizen with the law stacked against them, then it's older black folks. The parallels between the struggle for civil rights for blacks in the 1950's and 1960's and the fight for equality for gay folks are as obvious as the noses on their faces. Both groups were ostracized and derided for seeking justice, both groups were beaten and mocked for seeking equality, both groups were told that the oppressors had the Bible and Jesus on their side, and both groups faced enormous amounts of hatred when they set out to gain rights that others had.

Just like in the struggle for civil rights for black folks, the federal government is going to have to step in on this one. If the government hadn't stepped in and forced schools to desegregate then it would never have happened. If Robert Kennedy and LBJ hadn't used the power of the federal government to stop voter intimidation then many black folks would still be unable to vote in many parts of this country.

The sad fact is that in this country the minority will always have to use the power of the courts and the federal government to gain equal rights. If we had put civil rights for blacks up for a vote back in the '60's like we do same sex marriage today, then blacks would still be living under Jim Crow laws today. It's time for our judges to become activist once again, like they did when Earl Warren was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and extend marriage rights to all the citizens of this nation.