No problem kaylasdad99 , I did not express myself clearly. What I meant, is if amending the constitution was as easy as passing it with a majority in the house and the senate, and sending it to the president to sign it, this amendment would be passed. (as would a hell of a lot others) Thankfully, it is much harder to amend the constitution.
Jeeves
Ummmm…hi? Just wondering if you noticed my question. Fenris posted here and didn’t comment on it either, even though it was his idea.
Just having a bit of a flashback to my high-school geek days, wondering if I’ve turned invisible…
I know this probably won’t make you feel any better, and you probably know it already, but at least where I live, there are a lot of straight people (of whom I’m one) who are absolutely sick of this bullshit.
I think there’s actually somewhat of a denial factor operating. A lot of us are just completely unable to believe that our fellow human beings could be such incredible shitheads.
I always try and imagine what life would be like if homosexuality was the norm and heterosexuals were scorned, feared, and hated - and I was still one. And the conclusion I always come to is that I’m not taking any shit from anybody about who I sleep with. Fuck you if you don’t like it, keep your nose out of my bedroom. You want to make it illegal for me to sleep with women? Just try it, asshole. I’ll see you in court. In the meantime, stay the hell out of my face or you might find yourself the victim of a reverse hate-crime.
Along similiar lines, I always get a chuckle out of this: http://www.plif.com/archive/wc258.gif
Government needs to get out of the marriage business. Marriage is a religious matter and as far as I know, “Congress shall make no law.” Find a gay/lesbian church, or just an open-minded one, to marry you and you’re married no matter what the morons in DC say. And if that fact has to be pounded into the heads of the neanderthal conservatives (who claim to venerate the constitution, and freedom, so damn much) with a 16 pound sledgehammer, so be it.
-Ben
No, but if I’m not mistaken, it was burned in a day, didn’t it? Interesting metaphor if you think about it.
Honey, you don’t stop being angry about it. That’s what gives us the motivation to do what we can about it.
andy, just channel that anger of your’s into working to educate people.
And remember-it’s THEM, not you, and one day, they’ll get their’s. What goes around comes around, I firmly believe that.
**
Bill Clinton who was President of the United States signed the Defense of Marriage Act. So far as I know that makes it law everywhere. I’d be optimistic that it wouldn’t pass for the simple reason that passing an amendment isn’t an easy process.
Marc
I can understand the frustration felt by those who are against things like DOMA or any Constitutional Amendment similiar to it. Personally I’m not frustrated because I see the rights of gays being respected more and more over the years and I have no reason to think the trend won’t continue.
But to all of you who say things like “those pigfuckers outnumber the rest of us,” or “moving to Denmark is becoming more tempting,” and “sometimes I’m tempted to leave the country to the fundies” well I say, fuck you. That kind of attitude really doesn’t help. If you think you are in the moral minority and the rest of the country is overrun by pigfukers then maybe you do need to leave.
What is it about this board that attracts so many people who believe they’re so much smarter and better then everyone else?
Sorry about the hijack.
Marc
I dunno, MGibson, what brought you here?
If longing for a better way of life, and occasionally losing hope that a fair and equal justice will ever be in place for all of us is enough to warrant a “fuck you” from the almighty MGibson, then fuck you.
If looking at other countries, where the ratio of ignorance to enlightenment seems much higher than our own, (at least based on the current state of legislation), and longing wistfully to be there merits your scorn and derision, then fuck you.
You know what’s frustrating? Throughout high school, I stood and recited the pledge of allegiance every single day. Imagine, if you will, what it’s like to know that the wonderful sentiments, the happy rhetoric of that little paragraph, didn’t apply to you. “With liberty and justice for all”, I said. And I knew it wasn’t true, not for me, or people like me. Andygirl is right; it’s hypocritical.
Someday, if we keep fighting the ignorance that reigns around us, it may be true. The improvements that you see in the status of GLBT people didn’t just happen; it’s not just a dawning realization in the minds of pigfuckers everywhere that maybe everybody deserves to be treated like a human being. It took courage, and determination, and political activism, and brave temerity on the part of thousands of people to get us this far. It will take more of the same, much more, over years of time, to get us to liberty and justice.
I was born into this fight. I didn’t ask for it. I don’t want it. It sucks having to defend yourself every single day against ignorant pigfuckers who hate you, but don’t have anything against you personally. I would really rather not do it. So sometimes, I look at other countries, other ways of life, and compare them to our own; to get ideas, partly, and partly just to look, and wish for the day when this country is like that.
Then I get back to the fight. Because no matter whether I stay here or not, there will be gay kids born here every day, and so far, all of them are facing years of the kind of hell I went through. They deserve a better country, laws that treat them as human beings, the same rights everyone else enjoys. They don’t deserve to live in fear. So I work to change that.
Your “America, love it or leave it” bumper-sticker-sized philosophy is beyond being reprehensible. We have a right to leave, if we want. We have a right to compare our country to others. We have a right to complain about our situation, and to work to overcome the ignorant pigfuckers and their legislative discrimination.
And since this is the Pit, I have the right to tell you to fuck yourself sideways with a rusty broadsword, you ignorant, apathetic, disgusting excuse for a human being.
I don’t want “the trend to continue.” I want to be equal. Now.
This sort of thing really pisses me off. Think about it, I could meet a guy in a bar tonight, and legally marry him as soon as we got a marriage licence(monday?), but Andygirl could (if she were older) have been with a woman for 20 years, and would be turned away. I think one of the reasons that “those” people are worried about same-sex marriage is that they won’t be able to keep telling themselves it’s ok to hate gay men for being promiscious. If a lot of them decided to make life-long commitments, there goes that stupid assumption.
Don’t stop being angry, apathy gets nothing done because it’s too comfortable, so stay angry, and vote for people at the state level who seem to have your interests at heart.
and give up your current status as superior.
My family, small and tight knit and catholic and incredibly conservative, now has two gay and two lesbian couples, all my cousins.
It never occurs to any of us that my cousins are any different than any of the rest of us. As a matter of fact, we now have representatives of all seven sexes in our family, come to think of it, and I have to say that not one deserves my respect less than another.
People with real intelligence and emotional maturity feel as I do. I’ve never met an exception.(well, okay, I sometimes use intolerance of alternate lifestyles as an indicator of lack of emotional maturity)
So don’t despair. And take heart in the fact that the most puritanical among Americans tend to not be breeding that much.
And if you lower yourself to be merely “equal” I for one will be disapointed.
b.
I got the impression that marc is saying you should stay here and FIGHT for your rights, rather than give up and run away, and leave everyone else to fight for you.
I think something along those lines happened in Canada, though I don’t remember much about it (or enough to do a google search). Perhaps someone else will be able to recount it for us (and me).
**
I was first exposed to the Straight Dope on that short lived television show on A&E. Came to the web site and all sorts of neat discussions are taking place.
**
It isn’t just losing hope that pissed me off. It was the attitude that a small minority was so much better then the majority.
**
Fine, fuck me.
**
Well no shit it didn’t just happen by itself. Keep fighting ignorance, that’s fine. But don’t sit up and act like you’re the moral minority and everyone else is a pigfucker.
**
You’ll note that my arguement is not America love it or leave it. What I responded to was the attitude that most people in the US suck and that they’d be better off in Denmark. To those people I say fine, leave. I have never, nor will I ever, tell someone that they must love America or leave.
**
Fine, and I have a right to complain when someone believes that the pigfuckers outnumber the decent people. And of course the person complaining is one of those enlightened folk who are above the commoners.
Marc
I undertand. But since when does social progress ever happen now? The sooner the better though.
Marc
You know, there are times when the minority is right and the minority is more enlightened and the majority are a bunch of “pigfuckers” or racists or meddling busybodies or are just plain wrong. According to Gallup, in 1958 only 4% of white Americans approved of interracial marriage, and only 35% said they would vote for a “qualified black candidate” for President. If, in 1958, you where one of that tiny enlightened minority of people who didn’t think interracial marriage was “mongrelization” or whatever the hell it was people thought back then–that it wasn’t really anyone else’s business beyond the people who were getting married–and you were at least willing to consider voting for a black person as President, wouldn’t you have some right to consider yourself right, and the majority wrong?
Again according to Gallup, in the 1980’s there were several years where as much as 57% of the population believed that “homosexual relations between consenting adults” should not be legal. During that period, the majority of the population were being bigoted, meddlesome, liberty-hating assholes who were willing to trample the most basic individual rights and privacy and dignity of their fellow citizens on the basis of narrow-minded prejudice or religious puritanism or simple personal aversion. To hell with the majority.
The good news is that such attitudes can become, over time, so completely reversed as to make earlier attitudes seem unthinkable. By the 1990’s, 61% of whites had no problem with interracial marriage, and 93% would be willing to vote for a “qualified black candidate” for President. Attitudes towards homosexuals seem to be slowly moving in the right direction–although 42% of those polled still thought homosexuality should be against the law as recently as May of this year.
Until attitudes do change, I don’t see why those of us who aren’t idiots can’t feel ourselves morally superior to people we are manifestly morally superior to. We all feel morally superior to the Klan or the Fred Phelps clan or other small, jerkish groups of people–well, just because the assholes are in the majority rather than being a small, jerkish group that everyone despises doesn’t make them right.
Oh, wow. For a second there, I thought MEBuckner and MGibson were the same person, who was apparently so eager to debate this issue he started arguing both sides of it.
**
You’re right. I certainly don’t think that the majority opinion is always correct.
**
That’s a bit different then thinking the majority of people are pigfuckers. So a few people want an amendment to make marriage be between man and woman only. That makes the majority of people pigfuckers? I don’t think so.
Marc
You know, in a way, you’re right. Most people aren’t like the rabid zealots who believe that homosexuality is a sin against God and nature, and want to eliminate this scourge upon the earth.
Most people just don’t care. Most people sit back, smug and complacent, and say stuff like “Personally I’m not frustrated because I see the rights of gays being respected more and more over the years and I have no reason to think the trend won’t continue.”
Most people don’t see any reason that they should write to their representatives, opposing bills like the one referred to in the OP, because it doesn’t concern them. “Sure I support gay rights,” they think, “but not too loudly. Wouldn’t want people thinking I’m one of them.”
You know what pisses me off about most people? They can stop all this. Most people don’t want gays to be persecuted, criminalized, marginalized, and harassed. But it just doesn’t concern them enough to simply make their voices heard on these issues. The bigots of the world are counting on you, the complacent majority, to simply sit quiet while they fuck up the lives of their prey du jour. And most people, since it doesn’t concern them, are happy to do just that. Sit. Quietly.
With a little effort, a little compassion, a little understanding, all those complacent people, all those “it doesn’t really affect me” people, could put an end to all the suffering caused by the bigots.