According to the Daily News this morning, a group pushing to add a No Gay Marriage amendment to the Florida Constitution is close to having enough signatures to putting the amendment on the ballot.Two points in the article caught my eye:
•Pat O’Neill, a preacher from South Walton Church of Christ, told the News that “God judges nations based on their righteousness … this nation will stand or fall based on its support for homosexuality.”
I can’t help thinking that if God lets a nation stand when the president does his level best to legalize torture, invades a nation that wasn’t threatening us and locks innocent people away, sometimes for years, he’s not going to get that disturbed about people sleeping with members of the same sex. Because who we sleep with is a lot less unrighteous than who we torture.
The fact so many conservative Christians think homosexuality trumps all of those probably explains why one survey this year found that a majority of young Christians say “anti homosexual” is the phrase that sums up Christianity in America.
•The ballot language says that this amendment “protects marriage”—from what? Gay storm troopers who are going to charge in and force you into same-sex relationships?
No-one has ever come up with a coherent explanation for how gay marriage threatens straight marriage.
Some people say it cheapens marriage, but I can’t see how two gays who want to be together for life cheapen the institution more than, say, ABC running The Batchelor or Age of Love, or convenience marriages that get you better tax write-offs or military benefits.
For some specific individuals, the threat appears to be that if gay marriage was an option, they might give in. Anti-gay preacher Ted Haggard, for instance–the one allegedly involved with a male prostitute–describes his own sexual drives as a demon he’s been battling with his entire life. How many more like him are out there?
For others, maybe demonizing homosexuals is safer than tackling, say, adultery, which does a lot more damage to marriages and families. In most communities, and certainly in most conservative churches, there are going to be a lot more adulterers than gays; if religious activists went after cheating spouses with the same intensity they do homosexuals, they’d generate a lot more flak. Overall, hating gays must look a lot easier.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 8:15 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.