Who would have guessed that the great threat to the future of humankind would be individuals falling in love and pairing off. Yes, all over the country, the unthinkable happens. Gay couples live their lives together in houses alongside heterosexual couples. And just like these heterosexual couples, we struggle to make it through our time on Earth in one piece, dealing with economic hardships, job losses, illnesses, debt, car repairs, home repairs, friends, family, deciding what’s for dinner, and then eventually…you know…dying.
My journey is quite similar to that of the many heterosexuals in my life. Marriage is just a tool to make the challenge of merely existing as a couple a little easier without having to constantly jump through the legal loop holes of: owning a house together; sharing responsibility for bills and expenses; having the opportunity for health coverage for both of us if one of us is unemployed; securing a financial future for one partner in the case of the other’s demise; being allowed to visit each other in the hospital and be each other’s caretakers until death do us part.
This big claim that gay marriage is the ‘gay agenda’ to destroy humanity seriously boggles my mind. Not sure to which gays opponents are referring, because I personally have no colossal agenda. I got my own personal problems. I don’t have the time or energy to join in anarchy, and in no way want to witness the end of humanity. I’m DYING to hear the next Gaga album! In fact, none of the gay people I know (and I know a lot of them) have a gay agenda. Marriage and family are a heterosexual agenda—a preprogrammed, predetermined mainstream society lifestyle. Sadly, many are the heterosexual individuals I know who deeply regret having guzzled the Kool-Aid, so maybe it’s just a matter of letting us gays learn our lesson by giving us the opportunity to do the same. I would think it would be a great stroking of egocentricity to know others want to emulate what you’ve so…um…brilliantly perfected and executed without a flaw (that’s “cough ‘not!’ cough” for the sarcasm impaired).
As things stand now, we live in our quiet homes on our quiet blocks in our quiet suburban neighborhoods. We retain our privacy, so in no way do our relationships affect our neighbors, just like their relationships don’t affect us. Here in New York, where marriage is legal for now, our neighbors have NO idea if we’re legally married yet. Whether or not WE have those legal papers and legal rights, our cohabitating, which we’re doing either way, in no way impacts our neighbors or changes what they see when they glance over at the exterior of our home. Same bushes, same grass, same trees, same cars parked in the driveway, same cracks in the steps, same dogs staring out the same windows in search of the same squirrels. Heck. We’re not the ones putting ten-foot high wooden storks out on our front lawn announcing that we had sex!
If our pieces of legal papers don’t affect the people living on the other side of our fence, how can they possibly affect the millions of people we will never ever meet? Let’s take someone who is against gay marriage as an example. How about we pick on Chuck Norris (since he picks on us)? Consider this. I will never meet Chuck, and neither my marriage nor my life will ever affect him or have any influence on his life or how he lives it. I don’t care if he’s married, so why does he care if I’m married? In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that he speaks out against my existence, I wouldn’t care if he existed at all. Even for those who are a part of my life, the only way my marriage will affect them is that, for once, they’ll have to cough up 200 bux for my one special day, and I’ll finally get a return on the never-ending investments I’ve made in heterosexual marriage.
I’ll never understand the gluttonous craving to have so much say over the lives of others who have no bearing on your own life—especially from those who are most often the most vocal about government trying to infringe on their rights to guns (aka: violence) and freedom of speech (aka: bigotry). Instead of taking into consideration that they are messing with individual lives, these people are fed, blindly digest, and then vomit out an ‘us and them’ point of view. The anti-gay marriage supporters are the poster children for mob mentality, and above and beyond that, bullying. We can’t teach our children that bullying damages individual lives if we don’t lead by example. People who have never fully experienced discrimination (I’m not talking about being called choice words here) have no idea what it is like to be subjected to others dictating the quality of one’s life. It’s twisted enough to not ‘like’ someone you’ve never met (aka: hate), but to want to be in charge of his or her fate is barbaric and perversely inhumane.
Those up in arms over this preposterous notion of individuals wanting to devote their lives to one other individual often argue that the government shouldn’t be deciding if individuals who are gay should be allowed to marry. First of all, let’s not give the politicians too much credit for instituting gay marriage. Only a few of them have (and I thank them). Usually, politicians are more than happy to use our lives as a rhetorical bargaining chip—when in fact they are messing with uncountable REAL lives, holding individuals’ happiness and individuals’ quality of existing captive for the greedy purpose of political and financial gain, even if they know gay marriage isn’t going to have any harmful affects on their lives outside of their careers.
Secondly, let’s turn the whole ‘the people decide’ argument around. What if every single person of any orientation was subject to the country voting on whether they should be allowed to marry the consenting adult they love? That’s right, a complete denial of freedom of choice. Because, let’s face it, even if one wants to argue that gay is a choice and therefore not worthy of marriage, isn’t most marriage in the free world a choice? Sure, there are nagging, controlling parents and many inflated egos that get in the way of the details, but heterosexuals decide when they want to get married, why they want to get married, who they want to marry, and even if they want to get married at all. Could heterosexuals even FATHOM if all these options were taken away from them? It would be the ultimate attack on their pride. Sorry Devo, but freedom of choice is only what some of us got. Let’s face it. We don’t even decide by popular vote who should be running our country. So why should popular vote be deciding who runs another individual’s life?
If we want to strictly adhere to the steadfast restrictions placed on marriage by a power greater than all of us, marriage serves one sole purpose: the sustainment of society. If that’s the case, shouldn’t there be NO choices when it comes to marriage? Shouldn’t all people be forced to marry and have children? And further, shouldn’t people who are infertile or don’t want children not be allowed to marry? If you get married and can’t conceive, shouldn’t your marriage be annulled and shouldn’t you be forced to remain single for the rest of your life?
Scary Big Brother shit, right? Being forced to have others decide on the state of your union is psychologically traumatic. Believe me. I know firsthand. It feels to me like most heterosexuals have no valid reason to object to gay marriage other than to retain that ‘us and them’ status: ‘we deserve to have this, you don’t.’ It’s not exclusively the anonymous voters who have that attitude. Many are the people I’ve known who have friends and family with whom they share their lives, holidays, happy times, and hardships, and yet those same loved ones wouldn’t vote to grant them the right to make their commitment official despite having full knowledge of the validity of their relationship. It strikes me as a completely selfish attitude and reeks of superiority complex syndrome. Hello. Power trip anyone?
Perhaps the objection is just to the word marriage. Yes, there are those who have said “Let them have (some of) the same rights, but don’t call it marriage. That’s between a man and a woman.” Actually, what marriage is…is a public domain WORD. Say, for instance, gays were specifically permitted to join in civil unions. Chances are, gay couples are not going to go around flashing their engagement rings saying, “LOOK! We’re getting civil unionized!” They’re going to use the word that special interest groups are coveting. Can you imagine if we had to establish a thought police force to go around ticketing any gay couple who dares to define their legal bond that dares not speak its true name?
I know, I know. That’s not it at all! It’s about religious values (because we all know that even the most spiritually slothful feign a strong belief in God when they need the Lord to back their argument). Although it may be sacrilege to say it, marriage is not a religious institution (that’s called holy matrimony). Religion is not a requirement for marriage—in fact, it’s not a requirement for being a human being. So why should anyone else’s religion have a say in my existence? A vote by the people for or against gay marriage would be heavily weighted by religious convictions. That’s the inflicting of the religious beliefs of others on me—and actually, an infringement on my right to my own religion or my lack of religion! That’s playing God, puppeteering the lives of others, and that’s just sinful.
Do the faithful feel like gay marriage threatens their relationship with God? It doesn’t if they don’t get gay married (Hey! That’s what we can call it to distinguish it from marriage between a man and a woman!). Even if, hypothetically, one of the faithful makes a living serving dinners at a wedding hall and is faced with serving guests at a gay wedding (it’s easy to remember—guys get the beef, gals get the fish), that server is not supporting gay marriage, merely doing the job he or she is paid to do (and if you detest watching people enjoying dinner and dancing that much, just take the day off). Just like the faithful would be doing their job if they worked at McDonald’s and I came in and ordered two Happy Meals—one for myself and one for my partner. In neither case is it compromising any favoritism by God, because in neither instance is the faithful participating in gay acts.
For isn’t that the religious stance? ‘Gay’ is just an act in which we partake? Doesn’t it stand to reason then that we are only gay when we choose to have gay sex, not when we’re, say, standing at the bus stop listening to our awesome 80s playlist on our iPod? For gay to be a choice, heterosexuality has to be as well: anyone can CHOOSE to be either gay or heterosexual at the drop of a pair of pants. Which essentially means we’re all bisexual (you’ll find an ally in me if you want to argue that point). Those who are currently choosing heterosexuality should prove to all us gay-from-birthers that it’s a choice by holding an international gay day where EVERYONE falls in love with and has sex with someone of the same gender—basking in the sights, the feel, the scents, the emotions, and the impulse of being with the same gender, while absolutely relishing every moment of it like a true gay.
What I don’t get is, if gay is a choice, why do people who are ‘happily’ married with wonderful families chose to leave the heterosexual lifestyle to go gay (most often destroying promising political careers in the process…)? Is it because gays are running rampant, leading by example, and now everyone wants to do it? Do heterosexuals really think everyone is going to go gay and get gay married if it’s an option? I have much more faith in heterosexuality than that. I’m virtually positive heterosexuality isn’t a choice—lust that determined strikes me as purely instinctive. Besides, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would choose to do something I find soooo repulsive.
If just bearing witness to the interactions of gay people can make our children gay, shouldn’t all children be straight since heterosexuality has become such an epidemic? You can’t get away from it. It’s EVERYWHERE! That’s all I witnessed when I was growing up (I had three straight older brothers), and yet, here I am, gay as can be. Maybe I didn’t pay attention in heterosexuality 101 class, which is a big part of the heterosexual agenda, where children have to be taught to be heterosexual. Little boys and little girls think the opposite sex is positively icky and must be conditioned that actually, if they’d stop playing with and enjoying the hell out of their own body parts long enough, they may become convinced that the opposite sex isn’t that bad and maybe even tolerable.
Banning gay marriage is not going to put an end to gay relationships or dissuade gay identities—so any affect they could possibly have on society has already taken effect. But continuing to treat gay relationships as substandard might just continue causing young gay people to commit suicide because they think there’s no place for them in the world. What happened to protecting the children? Oh. I get it. It’s protection with exclusions. Only protect certain children. I know. I know. That’s not true at all. Young people can’t identify as gay because it’s a concept (and an act) they know nothing about and is a choice made later in life—now being made earlier in life because kids have become too exposed to the gay ‘option’ and find it overwhelmingly appealing: everyone else is being bullied and committing suicide? I want in!
So odd how adults can draw such a conclusion about children and their sexuality—because kids know damn well when other kids are gay. As early as third and fourth grade, I remember being called gay myself by fellow students, as well as watching them pick out other students to label as gay in class. They made no mistakes in identifying and unleashing their anger on classmates that I know are gay as adults because I ended up seeing them in the gay community after graduation. Hey, wait a minute. Maybe being called gay by heterosexual children when we’re young is what makes us gay! See. It’s all society’s fault! And to think, my hard-earned money pays taxes to put bullying heterosexual kids through school….
Why DO heterosexual adults assume everyone is going to get gay married? Is heterosexual marriage that bad that everyone wants to bail? Or are those envious heterosexuals just jealous of our gay love? Perhaps the religious folk have an attitude of, “No fair! If I can’t do it, you can’t!” If you ask me, I think that the faithful firmly believing everyone is going to go gay and stop having children are demonstrating the biggest…lack of…faith…EVER. Gays aren’t trying to put an end to procreation and advancement of humankind. In fact, it’s beyond me why, but many gays actually want to raise children! And many times they are raising the children that have been left in dumpsters (naturally, I mostly exaggerate, but you see my point). Plus, we adopt loads of unwanted dogs and cats. Someone has to be moved to action so all those Sarah McLachlan animal rescue commercials aren’t in vain! And we’re the ones who empathize with other creatures shunned by the self-righteous. We have a purpose, dammit!
Finally, let’s consider the opinion about gay marriage by the most influential man in the most powerful religious organization in the world (no, not Tom Cruise). Actually, let’s not. Why should the leader of an organization that allowed men to molest little boys (and girls) for centuries have any say in how to protect our families and our children? This organization CHOSE to expose children to physical and psychological damage—destroying young lives for centuries. Just as they try to destroy ours now by blocking gay marriage or attempting to take it away once the right has been granted. Maybe if this organization had allowed every human to fulfill his and her romantic and sexual needs naturally with another consenting adult, there wouldn’t have been such an epidemic of sexual dysfunction to cover up.
There I go, obviously an evil atheist (God, forgive me for playing the role to make a point), attacking the sacred, those who choose to believe what they believe, those who can choose a different belief system at any time with a few conversion courses, those who feel it is their right to choose what God to follow and what practices best fit and enhance their lives. My ignorant verbal assault is no better than that of the lone anonymous vandal who we occasionally hear about on the news who has, without provocation, vandalized a place of worship with spray paint and some nasty words, sending waves of shock and fear through the hearts of the voluminous number of members of these huge organizations. If only I could find a way to identify with their terror and pain and better understand the negative effects these unsolicited attacks have on their lives, I might be more sympathetic and tolerant. Unfortunately, the only experience I have that vaguely resembles theirs is the daily vandalism of my menial individual life by a huge organized group with an agenda to hold the roads in my journey hostage—while I cower in my home, in fear for my existence, with an agenda of my own: deciding what to have for dinner.
