Christian Right & Gay Marriage: A Commentary

From Online Journal:

Surveys have found, logically enough, that people who have gay and lesbian friends and relatives are more apt to support equal rights for homosexuals, including the right to marry. To me, the idea that these rights are even in question is a tragic absurdity. What right do so-called “Christians” have, to deny people I love one of our most fundamental human rights as specifically stated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to “the pursuit of happiness.” How can people who claim to find their own happiness in “the sanctity of marriage,” presume to deny anyone else their right to that same happiness? It doesn’t make any sense. It is, at best, hypocrisy.

At worst, it is bigotry and hatred — the very opposite of the God of love and tolerance that fundamentalist Christians claim to worship. In their own scriptures, Jesus tells them that they can find him in the “outcast.” But they continually refuse to believe him. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, they obsess about the letter of their scripture, but are blind to its spirit — the spirit of love, compassion, justice and tolerance that Jesus preached.

Every so often, I listen to Christian radio broadcast out of Winchester, to hear what talking points are being circulated and assimilated among the Republican base. The spin on gay marriage is that this represents “special rights,” rather than equal rights, because gay marriage has never been part of our Judeo-Christian tradition. The Christian right sees same-sex marriage as an attack on “the family,” which is based on “the union of one man and one woman;” and the family being society’s own basic building block, gay marriage is therefore an attack on American society itself, and ipso facto, anti-American.

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Right Wing Mormons Cry Over GLBT Protest

From LA Times:

“It’s disconcerting to Latter-day Saints that Mormonism is still the religious tradition that everybody loves to hate,” said Melissa Proctor, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School.

As an indication of how seriously the Mormon leadership takes the recent criticism, the council that runs the church — the First Presidency — released a statement Friday decrying what it portrayed as a campaign not just against Mormons but all religious people who voted their conscience.

“People of faith have been intimidated for simply exercising their democratic rights,” the statement said. “These are not actions that are worthy of the democratic ideals of our nation. The end of a free and fair election should not be the beginning of a hostile response in America.”

Jim Key, a spokesman for the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, said barbs by gay marriage activists were directed at church leadership, not individual Mormons.

“We’re making a statement that no one’s religious beliefs should be used to deny fundamental rights to others,” he said.

Proposition 8 opponents estimate that members of the Mormon Church gave more than $20 million to the effort to pass the measure, though that is difficult to confirm because records of campaign donations do not include religious affiliation.

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The Right Wing Label

From The Zoo:

The Right-Wing in this country uses fear and hate to win public support for their ideas. This cannot be disputed, and was even studied by Associate Professor Jonathan Haidt (“What Makes People Vote Republican?). In a nutshell, when our fears and emotions are tapped, we tend to react first and rationalize what we did later, even if our “rationale” is in conflict with the facts. Rather than appeal to our intellect and ability to reason our way to a solution, the Right-Wing stokes fear and hate and then tells you who to fear and who to hate. The reason why you should fear and hate becomes completely irrelevant once they have tapped into your emotions, for any kind of “reasoning” will make sense if it makes you feel justified in doing what you did, even if you normally would have thought that what you were doing was wrong. Without this tactic, they could not win support for their arguments on the facts alone. (And when I talk about “facts”, I’m talking about things that are actually true, not what many people might believe to be the truth.)

Read more at The Zoo!

Dumbest Right-Wing Comment of the Day

From RangerBobFriends.BlogSpot.com:

Banned and Dangerous is starting a new segment: dumbest right-wing comment, where me and the Count will bring the dumbest, most outrageous “did top five percent really just say that?!”, jaw-dropping comment from the bowels of Right-wing world. To kick off this new segment, here’s Mark Noonan on the gay marriage debate:

Thing is, there is no right to marry - if we had an inherent, human right to marry, then no law would be permissible prohibiting a person from marrying another, and anyone can immediately see that would be an asinine position to hold. A right, to be a human right, must accrue to an individual, not a group. Marriage requires at least two people, and thus cannot be a right - it is a privilege hedged about in law and custom with all sorts of restrictions as well as benefits and its purpose is the formation of families for the propagation of the species and the education of the young.

With all that, the advocates of gay marriage would have found the going rather easy had they just steadily worked on the public mind - but they turned to the courts to ram through what the people didn’t want, and now the backlash is growing stronger. You see, while marriage is not a right, to be consulted in matter of great public weight is the right of each citizen - in attempting to secure something bogus, the gay marriage advocates attempted to take away something precious - the right of free born people to govern themselves.

The Hate and Ignorance of the Religious Right

The following is from blpurdom.com.  THIS IS A HATE CRIME!

USJF is the ONLY group that has a suit going on right now that has the legal ability to invalidate all homosexual “marriage” licenses in the state. We’ve got a strong case, because it’s not about whether the California Supreme Court violated the state constitution or the statutes — it’s all about whether the state of California must follow its own laws. Those laws require that the PEOPLE must have the right to review any new marriage license…

…But the bureaucrats said NO! They tried to ignore the law and force Californians to accept a pro-homosexual marriage license — but we’re fighting them!

WE CAN WIN THIS CASE — IF WE HAVE THE RESOURCES TO FOLLOW IT ALL THE WAY THROUGH!

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