Whoa, where does the time go?
Diverted from my move to Bozeman, Montana… At the last minute my company decided to ask me to consider taking over the Omaha Office in Nebraska instead. …So here I am, in a city that Angie says she would “never move to by choice”… Crime in Omaha is sick, outrageous and random. Way too many burglaries, sexual assaults, armed robberies, unarmed robberies, shootings, drive by’s, car jackings… You get the picture.
Current events time; Maine and their “Gay Marriage” vote… WTF?! This whole issue just drives me up a wall. And both sides are getting it wrong as far as I’m concerned. Of course the anti side is wrong for the obvious reasons, but it’s the advocates that get me the most. They are derailing their own efforts by continuing to allow the opposition to define this as a “Gay Marriage” issue. This is not about “Gay Marriage” per se, it’s about civil rights, namely the right to equal protection under the law. When the state refuses to afford equal rights and protections to a person who is married based on his or her gender, it’s not an issue of gay discrimination so much as it is gender discrimination. This whole notion that we’re putting it to a vote is abhorrent to me, we do not put inalienable rights to a popular vote. That’s why we have a Bill of Rights, to prevent the”tyranny of the majority” that Plato, Rand etc warned us about. I don’t care, let me repeat this in no uncertain terms; I DO NOT CARE ONE WHIT what your beliefs are regarding marriage, religion, god, sexuality, etc. They are irrelevant! Marriage is a legal contract, entered into willingly by two adults, that has implications on a great many things such as access to inheritance, insurance beneficiary status, living will executor status, etc etc. Your religion is irrelevant, this is a secular legal issue. If you want to vote to ban gays from your church, you are free be as ignorant and hateful as you please. However, civil rights have no place being put to a popular vote, that’s why rights exist, that’s why people suffer and die fighting for those rights, because human and civil rights are inherent in the individual, not granted or revoked by the mob rule majority opinion of the day.
Honestly, I just can’t see why this is such a hard concept to grasp, for either side of the “debate”. I put that in quotes because civil rights are not up for debate. A church is free to discriminate against anyone it chooses, and is not forced to serve anyone it deems to be unworthy. The United States, on the other hand, is not free to make those discriminations, even when it is the popular opinion! It was probably the majority popular opinion in Alabama in 1930 that a black man could not marry a white woman. This didn’t make it ethically or legally correct just because the majority thought so. It is still legal in some countries to kill a woman because she was raped, and it may very well be the popular opinion that this is ok. Does that make it ok?
At some point the SJC must rule that any ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional. The USA will have full-stop gay marriage across the land. The case for holding it up is all that's being made at great cost in terms of time being wasted on it, and money.