Gay marriage bill fails to pass in New York

Senate sponsor Thomas Duane, a Manhattan Democrat and the Legislature's first openly gay member, expressed anger and disappointment. "I wasn't expecting betrayal," he said.

During debate, Sen. Ruben Diaz, a conservative minister from the Bronx, led the mostly Republican opposition.

"If you put this issue before the voters, the voters will reject it," Diaz said. "Let the people decide."

But Sen. Eric Adams, D-Brooklyn, challenged lawmakers to set aside their religious beliefs and vote for the bill. He asked them to remember that once even slavery was legal.

"When I walk through these doors, my Bible stays out," Adams said.

AP, via Huffington Post

I think this exchange sums up some things about where I stand on civil rights and the separation of church and state, and the arbitrary nature of religion-based morality pretty handily--which is why I clipped it.

I'm so over the idea that this sort of thing should be about who has the numbers--the rights of a minority just can't be left to the majority, but have to be protected. Also--religion can justify anything. What Sen. Adams pointed out regarding slavery is exactly right. We recognize it now as a horrible crime against human rights to "own" another person, but the Bible is rife with passages accepting if not favorable to slavery, and the cause of slavery was pleaded in the pulpits of this nation. We can see now how dehumanizing it is to deny people their freedom. Given a hundred years after the Civil War, and Biblical arguments were made for segregation and against miscegenation.

While it is true that the causes of both abolition and anti-segregation owe a great deal to the activism of certain churches, it's also true that churches existed that would deny people their basic human rights--that points up the arbitrary nature and the subjectivity of it, the actual lack of certainty in interpretation. What I ask is--setting aside prejudice in a society, or cultural norms, and holy books that say otherwise--what is the reality-based argument against equality? The factual argument, is what I mean.

I don't think there is a persuasive one. But the legislators, dependent upon popular favor for re-election, don't necessarily look at the literal practical issue regarding the civil rights of gay people. They look to what is popularly held to be moral, and that is influenced by religion.

(The above picture found with an article from babble.com that also argues from the position of separation of church and state.)