Tag Archives: gay marriage

Equal means completely equal

I applaud the 5 majority members of the US Supreme Court who today in Obergefell v Hodges voted for the rights of the GLBT community to get married in all 50 states without exception.  This is as significant a legal victory as were Brown v Board of Education, Boynton v Virginia & Loving v Virginia were in progressing our society to break down the barriers of exclusion.  I only hope that the 4 justices who voted against it are forever vilified by history for being on the wrong side of it, like George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy & Adolf Hitler.

The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution contains the treasured Equal Protection clause, which states:

“Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Equal protection for all persons means equal for all persons.  You can’t make laws that exclude certain groups simply because you don’t like them or your religion tells you that you shouldn’t.  If your religion is telling you to exclude people who otherwise wouldn’t be excluded except for the fact that they are of a different race, religion, gender, political or sexual orientation than yourself, you need to get a new religion.  You really need to get away from religion, but that’s a whole other argument.

Oregon – 1 step forward & 2 steps back

Oregon is considering adding 2 items to the ballot this year.  1 is to allow non-heterosexual couples to marry, and the other is to allow bakers, florists, caterers, or any other business to discriminate against them under religious exemptions, in effect by stating that since their religious beliefs forbid gay & lesbian marriage, then they shouldn’t be forced to do business with them due to their religious beliefs.

If I were a retailer, couldn’t I use the same law to say that I don’t want gays & lesbians in my business?  If I were a developer or landlord, couldn’t I keep them out of my properties & neighborhoods?  And could a doctor refuse to treat them if they need emergency medical services?  What about keeping slaves, since the Bible, and therefore their religion condones slavery?  Acceptance of slavery is all over the Old Testaments & appears more than once in the New Testament as well.

If slavery is an antiquated Biblical idea that we’ve overcome, how about our negativity & discrimination toward gays & lesbians?

We can’t make laws to require everyone to come together as one in our society & care at least as much for each other as we do ourselves.  Besides being a hippie Utopian dream, we raise our young to be warlike, animalistic, reptilian-brained creatures who seem to have no compassion for anything but their own needs & desires, and we look at those ideas as being non-rewarding socialism unless we give it of our own volition in dribs & drabs of charity to make ourselves feel good, but we shouldn’t be making laws that continue to separate us from each other using standards applied unequally to segments within our society.  That is the definition of discrimination in a nutshell.

It’s hard to believe that in 2014, we’re still fighting that battle.  Besides, I’ve always said that gays & lesbians have the right to get married & be as miserable as the rest of us married people.