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this again....
1. why should anyone, conservative or otherwise, religious or otherwise, care about who someone else chooses to love?
2. what possible legal grounds would there be for limiting the secular protections of the secular institution of marriage, drawing a line around who can and cannot avail themselves of it?
fact is there aren't any--which is why you have the after effects of a political mobilization coming from various religious groups to reframe the question as if it were religious...
these operate in almost any discussion of the matter, including here, and should maybe give folk pause, a chance to think about how easily and thoroughly the line between arguments that hold for a particular relgiious community and arguments across communities (belief versus politics) can be blurred in this generally reactionary political climate.
the effects of this mobilization is evident in the repetition of chicken little arguments...premise: the family is the basic building block of society. which would of course be fatally wounded if different kinds of families are legitimated--as if letting gay people avail themselves of the legal protections of marriage will cause a run on being gay and a wholesale abandonment of the bourgeois family unit--absurd logically, repellent politically.
i remember a particularly repulsive moment from one of the christian coalition videos that circulated amongst rural congregations in the fight over prop. 2: a guy stood in front of the acropolis and argued that the fact that athenian society had no problem with homosexuality meant that god had to smite it.
the video argument had the advantage of making the stakes clear that underpin the debate: for the christian right, gay people are a threat to civilization. which of course the chrisitan right gets to define. this "thinking" positions gay people in the same discursive space as terrorists....
is this bigotry?
curious coming from the same people who would otherwise be all about the personal responsibility angle politically to see motive being bumped from personal attitudes to god, which erase the possibility of bigotry by reducing the believer to a meat puppet carrying out/imposing a sanction legitimated by god...even as the judge not lest you be judged thing floats about in other, less foul areas of the same body of texts..no matter, obviously.
this fine logic has worked out really well in the past.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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