Thursday, April 4, 2013

Separate But Equal



  

 I’m too young to have been around in the days when upstanding citizens in the U.S. thought that setting dogs on little black children that had the audacity to want to go to school with little white kids was a pretty good way to while away the hours between The Lawrence Welk show and Leave it to Beaver.

"Man I can't wait til Al Gore invents the internet!"

 The rhetoric that was used back then to justify blatant disparity has been taken out of Pandora’s box, dusted off and is now being used all over again to discriminate against another minority group: gay people.  I'm glad that we've come far enough as a society since then that the vitriol is only figurative this time, but I still want to shake some people when I hear the idiotic arguments against gay marriage.

The most asinine talking point (and this is something that is used repeatedly) is the 'slippery slope' argument. For those among you that have never watched the Fox News Channel this is the assertion that if the state allows people of the same gender to marry there is nothing stopping people from marrying multiple partners, children or their pets. No shit. This is a thing that people say with a straight face. People that use this argument also are unable to distinguish between homosexuality and a paedophilia, probably because of repeated exposure to Catholicism, a religion in which Altar boy robes are apparently difficult to distinguish from sexy lingerie for many of the clergy.

I love how the term 'traditional marriage' is constantly used:
I didn't make this but I wish I did.

As a lesson in hypocrisy, mouthpiece for all things conservative Rush Limbaugh is on his fourth marriage. His third wedding (to a woman who had also been married thrice before her marriage to Rush) was officiated at the home of Justice Clarence Thomas and was attended by William Bennett. Yes that William Bennett- the author of the blustery Book of Virtues. There is no record of Mr. Bennett decrying the validity of the vows spoken 'Til Death Do Us Part' yet again by a couple on their collective sixth marriage. Rush's fourth marriage was attended by an illustrious gathering of noted conservatives, including Clarence Thomas (again), Rudolph Guiliani, Karl Rove and Sean Hannity, the guy who  fretted about the possibility of the government removing tax exempt status for churches that refused to perform same sex marriages on his histrionic radio program the other day. If they didn't take away Creflo T. Dollar's tax status for using church funds to buy his $23,000 gold toilet I think that Hannity's church is going to be ok to keep on hatin'.

Another bankrupt argument I heard used by a protester on the radio was , "How dare the Court disregard a clear referendum in several states and legalise gay marriage when the majority are clearly opposed to it?"
Ummmmm....
I'm pretty sure this was the majority of the town at the time.


 Clearly, the idea that people like that will someday feel bad about being on the wrong side of history is optimistic.




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Harumph!