It was not that long ago, when we consider the amount of time than mankind has lived, when we or our family members were all on the list of the despised and hated. The Republicans need to acknowledge that their time of discrimination has ended. A new wave of acceptance has reached America.
Just as the Republican Party, the Churches, and the red necks of America fought against the acceptance of a Catholic President, a Black President, and while other’s believed the Mormon Faith was a cult, the last prejudice against an entire sector of people in America is falling. Even though the Republican Party and those remaining Churches who still refuse to accept the gay population of America have many friends and colleagues that are gay, they still are denying the equality to them than no man has a right to deny any American who pays into our tax base,fights for our Country, and is a citizen of America.
When we ourselves are victims of prejudice we have a full understanding of the ways in which we are discriminated against and the names and ways the bigots try to hide behind Christian values, as a more endearing or kinder excuse to gain acceptance of their views, over that of acknowledging prejudice. The argument against marriage in the gay community sounds eerily the same as it did before Jews could marry into the white population or the reverse discrimination when Jews were not allowed to marry outside of their faith,before Catholics could marry Protestants or again the reverse discrimination when Protestants could not marry Catholics, and before inter-racial marriages were allowed. We all felt that discrimination or our family members did when we fell in love with someone outside of our religious convictions and were not allowed to marry them without threat of excommunication. The very people who were discriminated against, not that many years ago and those who still are, have clearly forgotten what discrimination felt or feels like and looks like when they were denied the right to marry because discrimination has always been raised to a higher level behind the excuse of Christian values.
For those who argue that the beliefs of the Churches is not mean-spirited, that may be true to those who do not deal with the situation on a personal level, but when I remember being a Catholic and marrying a Protestant during this period of time, I can assure you it felt like hate. To be told that my husband as a non-Catholic could not go to Heaven or the reverse from a Protestant mother-in-law that the Catholic Church was storing guns in their basement to attack non-Catholics while she tried her damnest to break us up and to invoke her Preacher’s name; it still is very difficult for me to believe that hate did not feed into these views of prejudice. It did not even come close to the hate during that same time and the Bible being quoted against the sin of a”white woman laying down with a black man.” The views out of the Christian communities in the past as well as against the gay population today, are very much fed on hate when we are the people who are involved with loving the person who the Churches deny us the right to marry.
The Republicans along with too many of the Churches are dead wrong on this issue. Either we are a Country of equality for all or a few in this Nation, that call themselves Republicans, are the ruling class of America and have the right to tell the rest of American people what their rights and place in America are. The last I remember they were not given the power to discriminate against anyone in our Constitution but instead only in their Churches.Seperation of Church and State is the law in America.
For Romney to say,” that the gay people have rights as they can visit each other in the hospital when they are sick,” seems to be a generous concession on the part of the Republican Party who has appointed themselves as the ruling class. Without marriage children will always be considered ill-legitimate in America. Without marriage a committed couple remains single for life. Without marriage siblings have a larger right in many States to the property and assets that a committed couple spends their lifetime working together to earn. To claim that marriage is just the right of heterosexuals and to hide behind Religion sounds a lot like it sounded when slaves were refused the right to marry on Religious convictions when inter-racial marriages were wrong because of religious convictions, and when Jews, Catholics and Mormons were burnt out of their homes for fear that one of their children would marry a white Protestant, because they were considered to be lesser than the white Protestant, by the religious convictions in the community of their day.
How far back do we have to fall or how much rule will we tolerate giving over to the Republican Party over all of us, who are ourselves or family members of discrimination, before we all vote for equality and justice for all in America? When the same Party denies that the gay population falls into the arena of hate crimes, while voting against it, and they have a History of yelling, “Religious Convictions,” for 200 years now, haven’t we who are or were one of those discriminated against, forgotten our own roots? It is time to quiet that over-worn excuse that allows their hate to grow while dividing the civility of the American people. Vote for equality for all Americans in November.
