Tuesday, November 8, 2011

How gay is the anti-gay movement?

Something extraordinary happened recently:  My cousin recently proposed to his girlfriend of three years.  Doesn't sound very extraordinary does it?  But it is.  Or at least, it's supposed to be.  See in this country gays have full marriage equality and if you have been listening to Christian Conservatives you would know that once same sex marriage becomes legal it will inevitably be followed by the destruction of the institution of marriage!  The Family will cease to exist!  People will marry horses and cows!  Slippery slopes will drag us all down to anarchy!  Civilization will cease!

Except none of that ever happened.  Civilization is still going (despite the best efforts of Greece), my cousin is getting married in a year and it turns out they have to wait that long for a venue because apparently a lot of other couples also plan on getting married it seems.  It's been years now since the legislation passed and despite all expectations heterosexuals are still getting married and starting families - which seems rather extraordinary considering the fact that gay marriage was supposed to destroy both marriage and the family!  Imagine that.  In yet another shocking turn of events, people are still not marrying their pets/toasters, pedophilia is not legal and "the gay agenda" somehow failed to turn us all gay.  So much for those slippery slopes...

The thing about all these demonstrably false claims about "the gays" is that, like a lot of the anti-gay movement's activities, they sound a little... well... gay!  Think about it:

Firstly there is the preoccupation with gay sex.  I'm a hetero male.  Do you care to guess how much time I spend imagining gay sex acts?  None.  I spend absolutely no part of my day picturing what gays get up to behind closed doors.  "None" is also the amount of homosexual pornography I look at.  Now I can't possibly speak for all straight people but I'll wager that for pretty much all of them the answer to the above questions would be somewhere between "very little" and "none at all".  You know who does spend a fair amount of time thinking about gay sex though?  Gay people, sure.  But also anti-gay activists.  How weird is that?  The people who act the most outraged by the very idea of gay sex spend hours of their day thinking about and talking about the details of gay sex.  They even check out a lot of gay porn - and not just any old porn, the hardcore S&M stuff - and then show it to other people who also claim to be very much against homosexuality.  They do this on a regular basis too. Yeah, that's totally not gay...

Secondly there is their need to make the lives of gay people as miserable as possible.  To the anti-gay brigade, the concept of "live and let live" is more abominable than socialism and secular humanism combined.  They don't believe in liberal hippie nonsense like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you".  Instead they go out of their way to oppose anti-bullying and hate crime legislation that would protect gay kids from being tormented to the point of suicide.  Yes, here you have "good" Christian folk being PRO-bully.  Their rationale seems to be that kids won't "choose the homosexual lifestyle" if they can make it unattractive enough.  The fact that countless kids still somehow "choose" a sexual orientation that will guarantee lifelong harassment, mistreatment not to mention verbal and physical abuse never makes them consider that perhaps choice has nothing to do with it.  Now I'm not saying that these pro-bully, anti-gay folks are themselves homosexuals who feel that since they are forced to live miserable, closeted lives by their beliefs then no other gay person should be allowed to be happy and openly gay because that would be slander.  All I'm saying is that it sure looks a lot like it.  The logical inference of their position is that being gay is so attractive that if it was a hassle free option then everyone would want to be gay!  Which makes very little sense because typically the only people wanting to be gay are people who actually are gay.  Just sayin'...

Thirdly there is the statement that same sex marriage will "destroy marriage".  I've never heard a particularly good argument as to why allowing more people to get married will somehow lead to less marriage though.  Like my cousin (and the millions of people like him and his girlfriend) demonstrate, the fact that same sex couples are getting married does not in any way diminish the desire for marriage among opposite sex couples.  Really the only scenario I can imagine where legalizing same sex marriage would end a hetero marriage is if say you're a gay person who entered into a straight marriage (due to religious or societal pressure) during a time when gay marriage was illegal but then when it became legal you decided to stop living a lie, get a divorce and finally marry your true love.  Again I'm not saying that when anti-gay activists are saying "same sex marriage will destroy marriage" they really mean "if it was legal it would probably be the end of my marriage".  Sort of sounds like it though...

Oh and apropos of nothing, here is a growing list of the top anti-gay crusaders who turned out to be gay.

2 comments:

GumbyTheCat said...

This dovetails nicely with my upcoming post about Eugene.

Eugene Delgaudio, that is.

TimmyMac said...

Besides, few things are more embarrassing than being beat up by a gay man . . .