No on Prop 8

This is a long way off my Cute-ture business but it was sent to me from one of my dearest friends and I believe his words are poignant and worth sharing. For my Aussie friends - Prop 8 is a proposition on the California ballot that voters can overturn by voting yes. Currently gay and lesbian's can marry under Californian law and have the same rights as any other married couple. Prop 8 has been put on the ballot to try and overturn that right.
Tracey

From My Friend.


With only a few days left to election day, I can’t help by wonder why there are so many good, honest people backing Prop 8 - you know, the constitutional amendment in California to prevent state recognition of gay marriage.

I fully understand where they are coming from. I grew up the son Baptist missionaries – good, honest parents intent on serving God. I graduated from Liberty University (Jerry Falwell’s school in Lynchburg, VA), a place filled with good, honest people trying to make the world a better place. Like my good honest friends from the religious right, I also want to settle down and build a life with one special person – to get married, one of the most important rights in society. However, in my case the only honest, loving marriage I could have would be with another man. I am gay - obviously, not by choice, as anyone from a similar background can attest. I would like to think that I am still a good, honest person. I love my family, work hard at my job, pay my taxes, try to be honest with everyone, and still believe in the treating others as I would like to be treated. I love my parents deeply, and it still breaks my heart to see my mother cry because she fears that she won’t see me in heaven. While I hope that my parents will some day change, and they hope that I will someday change, we have, in our own way, come to recognize that we have to love and accept each other for who we are. I get it – my parents, along with many other good, honest people, firmly believe that being gay (or acting on it) is a sin - and that, before God, marriage is a bond between a man and a woman. But I don’t see how that should translate into denying me and the one I love the right to marry under civil laws.

Americans pride themselves in being a tolerant nation. The now famous (or infamous, depending on your viewpoint) Sarah Palin recently said that some nations (presumably some of the nations under Islamic law) hate the United States because of our tolerance. But what Sarah and the religious right don’t seem to understand is that, while the predominant religions in the US may be less strict on non-believers than strict adherence to Islamic law, what makes a nation tolerant is not the tolerance of the religious beliefs of its majority, but the willingness of its people and government to separate religion from legislation - and to legislate without discrimination based on moral/religious views.

History is full of good honest people who have missed this concept. According to the Bible, good honest people in Old Testament times believe it was ok (and in fact, God’s mission) for them to kill all of the heathens in surrounding lands. Good honest Christians during the middle ages thought they had God’s blessing (and were doing God’s will) by killing Muslims. Good honest American puritans thought it was God’s will for them to burn suspected "witches”. Good honest Americans during the Civil War fought to preserve their God-given right to own slaves, and were willing to kill other good honest Americans in the process. Good honest people in Germany in the 1930’s and early 40’s thought it was ok to discriminate against Jewish people on a national level. Not that long ago, good honest Americans were willing to legislate prohibitions on interracial marriages, and those people firmly believed God was on their side. And today, there are countries in the world where good honest people have adopted Islamic laws that we see as violating basic human rights, but that they see as being fully justified based on moral/religious imperatives. While we can look at these as examples of intolerance, in each case those good honest people that we see as being intolerant believed they were acting in the best way to please God (or their relevant equivalent) and preserve their society.

For those looking to vote yes on Prop 8, please stop to think about tolerance. Are you in favor of Prop 8 because it is necessary to preserve any particular rights you may enjoy? If so, which rights (because I honestly don’t see how Prop 8 preserves or protects anyone’s rights)? Or are you in favor of this because you feel society should adhere to your religious/moral views? If so, aren’t you being an example of the same intolerance we condemn in others and in our own history? I am not asking for you to change your religious convictions. I am not asking to get married in your Baptist Church or Mormon Tabernacle (just like you are not asking your Jewish friends to get married in their synagogue). But I would like to have the same right that you have before the state to marry the one person I want to spend the rest of my life with. That is the beauty of tolerance. We can disagree on right and wrong before God, but we can also learn to keep that disagreement without legislating discrimination.

It’s not that big a stretch for you. Conservative Christians – you believe that your Mormon and Catholic friends in this campaign, while they may be good honest people, are going to hell unless they accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour. Many of your leaders claim that Mormons (and for that matter, Jehova’s Witnesses and various other religious groups) actually are preaching false religions – and in fact, if you read your Bible, it has much more condemnation against those preaching false religion than against my being gay. While strong religious differences (with profound ramifications on views of eternity) exist among virtually all of the various groups involved in this campaign in favor of Prop 8, you have already come to accept that in the civil arena you should all be treated equally as religions – that your tax exemptions before the state should not be based on the whether or not, as a society, we think your religion is right and true in God’s eyes.

If you take your Bible literally, you also may believe that adultery is wrong, or that divorce merely for irreconcilable differences is wrong, or that marriage outside of your faith is wrong – but yet you have come to accept that, in these respects, discriminatory laws should not be the means for you to try to get society to agree with your beliefs. You also understand that it is not up to the government or the public schools to teach your religious beliefs – and that, while teachers may explain how laws permit actions you think are wrong morally, that fact is not to form the basis for whether or not the laws exist. For example, you realize that, while schools teach that the constitution protects an individual’s right to burn the flag, that does not mean that the teacher is encouraging the students to go out and burn a flag. You are happy that schools teach students that they should not discriminate against someone based on their religion – and are not threatened by that as encouraging your child to dispute the validity of your particular faith. You know that you are the one responsible for teaching your values to your child – and that the teaching of tolerance in a school is not a reason for you to try to legislate discrimination.

So as a minority in this society where you have a chance to discriminate against me based on our conflicting religious/moral views, please stop to think about what you are doing. You are no less righteous before God if you treat me like you would any other person outside your faith – you can continue to try and convince me to change before God - and I can continue to try and convince you otherwise -- but let's have that discussion outside the legislative arena. Please allow me equal rights under civil laws.

And you know better than to say that, even with Prop 8 I have the equal right to marry a woman -- that's like denying a barren woman the right to adopt by saying she has an equal right to natural childbirth.