So, if you hadn’t heard, the Californian Supreme Court recently overturned a law that banned same-sex marriage as unconstitutional, deeming any law that restricted the rights of homosexual couples to marry to be discriminatory. This is frankly excellent news, as apparently it’s inspired several other states to attempt the same thing.
The utterly predictable reaction of the conservative religious lot, of course, was to rant and rave about the need to protect the sanctity of marriage and defend the family and so on (incidentally, one of the bills attempting to make same-sex marriage legal, in Minnesota, was entitled the "Marriage and Family Protection Act" — oh, the irony). A fun quote from some conservative nutjob: "No matter how you stretch California’s Constitution, you cannot find anywhere in its text, its history or tradition that now, after so many years, it magically protects what most societies condemn," says Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. Well, sorry, but a) the fact that most societies condemn it doesn’t make it wrong, and b) the fact that it hasn’t been interpreted specifically as protecting gay people in the past doesn’t mean that it doesn’t — or do you expect it to explicitly list every single group who’re entitled to equal rights? (I’d suggest that California’s constitution may be old enough not to explicitly list women and black people as deserving of rights, and ask if that means they should be considered inferior, but I’m worried he’d say yes.)
Then it hit me. Racist groups like the BNP say that it’s not that they hate people who aren’t white — it’s just that they want to help white people, to defend them in the face of the rampaging hordes of illegal immigrants (and legal ones, and people whose grandparents moved to England in the Fifties, and so on). Homophobic groups like the Catholic Church [1] say that it’s not that they hate gay people, it’s just that they want to protect straight people’s right to get married, and have all sorts of legal and financial benefits (if I remember correctly, married couples in the US get something like 1,000 different benefits that unmarried couples aren’t entitled to).
Bigotry is all the same, no matter who it’s directed at. Hopefully, one day people will learn to keep their neuroses to themselves, and allow the rest of us to live our lives without paying attention to what their imaginary friend tells them.
| [1] | Don’t believe me? "…only marriage between a man and a woman is moral" and so on, says the Evil Emperor^W^WPope. |