I just want to quickly point out that President Bush is a raging asshole who needs to be ousted. We were lied to about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, we're still no safer post-9/11 than we were pre-9/11, and now Bush wants us to write discrimination into the Consitution. Fuck him.
We really need to stop pulling Presidents from deep below the Mason-Dixon line.
You know, I highly doubt that Kerry is going to be any better. (He waffles on gay marriage rights, for one.) But hopefully he can't be any worse. He's going to inherit one mess of a country.
Homosexual marriages. I have yet to hear a compelling argument as to why they should remain banned. Is a marriage specifically intended to produce children? No, so biology is out. Is a marriage controlled by and created for religious reasons? No, it doesn't have to be. It's your state that issues the license and rights, not the church. Is the US Christian cabal afraid of men having buttsex? Yes, despite millions of hetero men having buttsex with women in perfectly legitimate marriages. As a nation we're finally getting over mixed-racial marriages. It's time to get over same-sex marriages.
All of Bush's bullshit about "protecting the sanctity of the institution" is meaningless politico-speak. And if you can't recognize a man courting the nation's largest pool of voters - Stupid People - you're missing something pretty fundamental about our government. I honestly believe that any anti-gay marriage argument comes down to people being repulsed by homosexuality and/or trying to avoid legitimizing gay culture. Which is only a hair's breadth away from how America treated(s) women and minorities and any other adjective that wasn't white and male.
Here in my hometown we had a great newspaper editorial asking why all the fuss and an actual article which mentions the challenges faced by gay and lesbian couples... which surprised the hell out of me because we live in a massively conservative WASP area. The writer's main point was, we can have it both ways. Homosexuals can enjoy the rights and privileges of a true marriage, and homophobes can continue to be married in churches.
I had a near-fight with my uncle on this matter, and I've had some ugly entanglements in the office. It's not a pleasant thing to try and discuss, because some people's hatred of homosexuals runs disturbingly deep. (And it's always rather obvious that it comes from a conservative religious worldview.) I'm not gay, and as far as I know there are no homosexuals in my family. But if I was, I'd hate to think of my co-workers and family striving to deny me the right to publicly pronounce my love for another man... to be able to change my name, or claim his dead body, or visit him in a hospital, or share bank accounts, or file joint tax returns, or whatever.
And just to be clear, if we do have to reach a compromise, the only acceptable one is to grant civil unions all the privileges of a marriage. I'm not hung up on the word "marriage" here. Sure, today there's a positive allure to having a "marriage" but after 50 years of full-service civil unions, the vocabulary will be blurred anyway. If it must come to it, let the babies have their word, just give homosexual couples the benefits and rights.
