I'll bet with the victory of Barack Obama in the presidential race a lot of Americans mistakenly think we're a very liberal country now. However, if we look at the fact that people in four states all voted against legalizing gay marriage, we might realize we're a lot more conservative than we thought.
When it comes to civil liberties, there are few people that are bigger supporters of them than I am, but when it comes to gay marriage I just can't champion it.
I think this is how many Americans feel and perhaps I can explain why so many said no to gay marriage, even in a "liberal" state like California.
Being married involves more than just living together forever; there are a lot of advantages and disadvantages politically, financially, psychologically, etc. To willingly bring both the government and corporations (i.e. insurance, banking) into your love life just to make a political statement is taking the path of most resistance.
Therefore, aren't gays actually better off as "civil unions" than married couples?
Of course there's always the argument that "marriage" is just a word, and the resistance to it is just a matter of semantics.
However, that argument goes both ways: if it IS just a matter of semantics, than why has the homosexual community made such a big deal out of this issue?
Straight couples have a divorce rate of 50 percent according to the old saying, and Divorcerate.org backs up this claim.
And since the divorce rate is so high for straights, I'd imagine it would be even higher for gays since they do not have the tendency for life-long monogamy that straight people have, so isn't it reasonable to suspect the divorce rate for gays would be even higher?
It's possible that this high rate of divorce will dissuade gays from marriage completely and they'll be content with just living together.
It'd be a shame to fight this hard for a right just to see it abandoned later on down the road.
Americans have spoken, and as much progress as we've made in terms of cultural diversity and tolerance, we're not ready to make that leap to equating gay marriage with traditional marriage. And I'm not just talking about zealots, since, statistically speaking, this must be true of mainline Americans.
Look at the numbers: the religious right is in the MINORITY, so how could they account for all of the people voting against gay marriage?
They can't. Yet the liberal media equates ALL anti-gay marriage supporters as Fred Phelps clones, what the hell?
I'm sure there are plenty of atheists, agnostics, and people of faiths other than fundamentalism or evangelicalism who are against gay marriage.
Why doesn't the media or the gay rights lobby ever address this demographic? Because to even admit that not everyone who's against gay marriage is a hateful zealot would really hurt their cause.
Those of us who are tolerant of gay people know the difference between tolerating something you disagree with and embracing it. The problem is, Americans have been conditioned to equate tolerance with acceptance and they are NOT the same thing.
An absence of acceptance is not same as bigotry or hatred.
Nearly everyone alive today would agree that slavery was wrong, discrimination based on race and gender was wrong and we've come a long way to fix the mistakes of the past. But, if we're such an enlightened country, why are we afraid to take what would seem to be the next logical step?
I guess we realize it might not be quite as logical as we think it is. If it were, there wouldn't be such resistance, if any at all.
A part of me really hates the fact that I am in favor of deliberately denying a group of people a certain right. But another part of me says the right in question is unnatural and would set a dangerous precedent.
All major decisions such as this set legal precedents for better or worse.
If gay marriage goes mainstream what would be next?
Bestiality?
Pedophilia?
Polygamy?
Scatology?
Where do we draw the line and why?
Fear not, gay marriage supporters, because I think someday you eventually will win this battle, just not right now.
Consider how long it took for us to reach a level of tolerance in America - that in itself is a major victory for gays, especially compared to the rest of the world.
It's going to take a lot more time to make the transition from tolerance to acceptance.
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and what about the people that say Gay sex is unnatural... turn to animal plant stupid you might learn a thing or two. The fact is that among the approximately 1500 animal species whose behavior has been extensively studied, homosexual behavior in animals has been described in at least 450 of those species. It runs the gamut, too, ranging from occasional displays of affection to life-long pair bonding including sex and even adopting and raising orphans, going so far as the rejection by force of potential heterosexual partners. The reality is that it is so common that it begs for an explanation, and sociobiologists have proposed a wide variety of explanations to account for it. The fact that it is so common also means that it has evolutionary significance, which applies as much to humans as it does to other animal species.
so please shut the hell up and let us marry who we love!
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