The cornerstone arguement for opponents of gay marriage is that it would be the end of the American Family as we know it. Now I'm not here to define family but I'm going to say that the "ideal" American Family looks much like the one I grew up (gay) in. Two parents, siblings, church-going, well-to-do, Republican. Unlike those that claim being a queer is catching, I didn't have anybody who was contagious around me.
The other oft-voiced claim says that since gays can't have children they have no need to be married. I won't go into how insulting I would find this if I were a married woman without a functioning uterus or a married man with a severe testicular injury. Neither of these herterosexual examples can have children and so they must get divorced from their spouse straight away. But I digress.
This argument is fundamentally flawed because marriage is so rarely held in sacristy by anyone these days gay or straight. Let's take Britney Spears. All-American teenager, pop-star, one time role model, and also a girl who had sex out of wedlock, got married (and divorced) twice, has two children, whom she has endangered numerous times by being an addict and mental patient. Not only do I fail to see how this uphold the American Family, but I'm also pissed because I don't see Congress going into Special Session to put her in the DOMA.
Even better the new-ish news broke last week that Bristol Palin and her baby daddy had split. I had written right after the Republican Convention that I found Sarah Palin appealing...all of America found Sarah Palin appealing before they found out she was a hippocrytical, Bible-thumping biggot. But that's another soap box for another article. What chaps my ass about this (for lack of something just as strong but clean) is that this family was used by the McCain camp as a picture for the ideal. In the end both candidates on the GOP ticket make GOP values hollow. McCain is divorced, Palin's a middle-age Grandma who uses government to flog her opponenets into submission. While I understand that not all Republicans are against gay marriage and that even some Democrats are; the problem I have is that my "lifestyle" is being held up to the looking glass and scrutinized at the same time that theirs is being excused as "Human Mistakes".
It does in fact seem, that most of these divorces and unwed pregnancies, dalliances and Branjoleena-like sexual escapades are brushed under the rug or written off under the "That's life," column. However, for most homosexuals this isn't the case, not even in the Community. When news leaked of one of the lesbian couples who had sued to be married in Massachusetts were now divorcing (like a straight couple) people were ready to lynch them and then burn them in effigy. Maybe we tend to do this because we spend so much time seeing homosexuals as something different; something scary, amoral and down-right "Not Right".
Time after time we have seen that is far easier to disenfranchize and abuse those that we see as "not human". Whether it's bringing Africans across the Atlantic to chop cotton, or Zulus concentrated in camps, a concept that was copied in Nazi Germany 80 years later for the Jews. It seems to me, from where I sit, that the problem is not Britany Spears of Anjoleena Jolie (although they get far too much attention than true decency allows) or even Sarah Palin. Rather the biggest danger facing the American Family today is that it can no longer ignore the fact that we, the gay community, are a part of it.
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