To get this out of the way--I don't want it to appear in any respect that I endorse anything said by Pat Robertson. Oh no. What I'm doing by posting this clip is sort of like having my mental immune system purge a foreign invader. I saw it a couple of days ago--it festered inside my brain, and only by blogging about this crap can I feel like I've really cleaned it out of my system. You know, the way you might taste something so nasty, like a bad bit of lunch meat, that you have to spit it out and right away rinse your mouth out. So forgive me if I'm linking to ignorance, stupidity and hate. I'm only doing so to call it out properly.
Now, right at the top of the video--wouldn't you naturally think that "gay advocates" would really more properly be: "Gay people, their friends and allies, and other people who support equality?" I would say so, since there are plenty of people who didn't support Prop. 8 nationwide. Probably world-wide.
The cute couple in the "Bride" and "Groom" shirts? They look so normal, don't they? Well, the fellow is Luke Otterstad, and he....isn't exactly normal. No, he's part of something called the Church of the Divide, and they are a small family affair who go around being pests in and around California, and have associations with a would-be abortion-clinic bomber. They seem a little like Westboro Baptist without the press.
And basically, when you see Pat Robertson, or Maggie Gallagher of NOM--just keep in mind one irritating detail that I can't miss--
How different is what they do from WBC with their "God Hates Fags" signs? Because really, all they are doing is using a tiny scrap of the Bible to justify denying rights to a group of people with no other basis--only logically dubious justifications and outright lying occasionally supported with pseudoscience--which are always combined with the worst sort of Drama Queen Prophecies of Doom. Oh noes, where iz our rights? Everyone's gonna go gay! The species will go extinct! And other insanely implausible things, when you get right down to it!
When the science goes something like this:
As for the concern that the votes of pro-Prop-8-ers were wasted--
Oh, fucking, well. Interestingly enough, some things actually should not be put to a popular vote. So sorry you thought that there wasn't actually a check and balance on you, but the courts actually exist for just that purpose. And whether Judge Walker is a "homosexual" as Pat Robertson points out, is irrelevant to whether his decision was correct with respects to the law. He didn't say "Gay marriage is okay because I said so!" He cited case law and history and pointed out something these lame haters haven't yet figured out--
They don't have a good reason for being against marriage equality. They are the one's whose argument comes down to "because I (and my version of God) say so." They are the ones who are making up tiresome crap to try and invalidate the reality of the relationships, the households, the ties that bind people right here and now.
And when a sanctimonious right-wing wannabe-relevant political has been like Newt Gingrich signs up for the hating, lying, wrong side of the culture war--citing history and using the bullshit phrase "protecting marriage", which are words that should stick in his throat:
it needs to bite him on his hypocritical rear end.
What people like Robertson, Gallagher, Otterstad, and Gingrich all fail to realize, is that there is nothing, not one thing, different in form in same-sex relationships from opposite-sex relationships, but gender. And that the sexual aspect has very little to do with things, ultimately. If, say, Newt Gingrich was to find that his spouse was unable to meet his needs through illness or injury, he wouldn't just leave her, would he?
Oh, wait....
Maybe a serial adulterer and multiply-married jerk isn't quite the example that Phyllis and Del are of long-term commitments to marriage.
Is it wrong that I'm personally addressing Gingrich's life? Maybe it's a little ad hom--but then so is the bullshit that people are talking about Judge Walker. And also, because I want to stress that the issue is not about an abstraction, but about real people's lives. Someone's friend. Child. Parent. Brother or sister. And sloughing off the reality of that would be so wrong as to make one wonder if such a person who could had even a little compassion in them at all--
Compassion, meaning what we need to understand how to do right--how to treat the other as you would want to be treated. Compassion being the real basis of society. And the bullshit that the 700 Club, and NOM, and the religious right as a whole, and too many other sanctimonious assholes to count, being the basis of what is wrong with the world.
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