New Jersey based anti-gay group National Organization for Marriage (NOM), held a Celebrate Marriage and Family Day in Rhode Island last week. NOM boasted that they were one of the largest financial contributors to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign in California. Their mission: to "protect" Rhode Island from allowing same sex unions of any kind. That's right, no recognition in the government or religious institutions. Gross. So basically you just want us to exist then...thanks.
Rhode Island queer activists proudly protested outside of NOM's event.
Representatives from NOM stated that the event was not meant to be political or religious, just celebration with multiple renewed vows. Ahem...
Yeah, that wasn't political or religious at all...
In a nut shell, she's saying that if the government allows same-sex unions, the human race is bound to end because of the lack of child production. Who fills her mind with these crazy ideas? Clearly, queer couples have alternative routes to creating a family. What would she say to orphaned children or those in the foster care system? "Oh sorry dear...we could have placed you in a warm home filled with unconditional love and parents able and willing to provide you with anything you'll ever need...but they were the same sex. Have fun in the (too often) corrupt child care system."
NOM says they want to protect family and love...but what kind of love are they showing? If anything, they are destroying the basic fundamental concept of love, and that is to end hate. Their "love" is centered on the idea of hatred and discrimination. I'm from New Jersey and I shutter to think that headquarters for NOM is located in Princeton. With a vote for equal marriage coming up soon in New Jersey, we need to be stronger, more devoted, and more organized than the hateful groups.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
If you're in the area, the Women's Center of Ramapo College will be hosting an equal marriage demonstration on Saturday, October 3rd from 12pm-3pm. It will consist of a letter writing station, phone bank, postcard station, as well as a large-scale symbolic wedding ceremony open to all!
And please don't forget about the National March for Marriage Equality on October 10th-11th in DC.
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gross, those people make me sick. "love" indeed!
Jesus loves you... That is why he told me to send you queers to the extermination camps in order to protect the family.
Christo-Fascism is no different from any other faith based ideology of hate.
It is nothing short of amazing how the invisible magic sky daddy hates the same people they hate and wants them to deny LGBT/T people their constitutional rights of equal treatment under the law. See the 14th amendment.
I am so sick of people claiming their superstitions trump my rights as an American citizen and a human being.
No gods, No masters
Now I keep thinking of bumper stickers:
"Jesus loves you. Everyone else thinks you're an asshole"
And
"God, please save me from your followers"
"In a nut shell, she's saying that if the government allows same-sex unions, the human race is bound to end because of the lack of child production. Who fills her mind with these crazy ideas? Clearly, queer couples have alternative routes to creating a family."
Uh, and both queer and non-queer couples need not produce children in order to have a family. Two husbands are a family; a woman, her brother, and their dog are a family. Children are not a requirement for a family, and I don't think you were trying to imply that, but you did with "creating a family".
Good point! That's definitely not what I meant, I was just quoting her ideals. Should infertile couples not be allowed to wed? Her ideologies are flawed and dangerous.
Ugh. They give the syllable "NOM" a bad name.
OM NOM NOM NOM
Ugh. I got as far as the concept that a child needs to know that the man and woman that conceived him/her loved him, and then all I could think about were my friends who were adopted... and then I just had to stop watching this idiot.
I love the 'human race will die out' argument. What is going on in these wingnut churches that makes them think that gay marriage will be so great that all the otherwise straight people will leap to marry same-sex partners and stop reproducing? Everyone. All over the world.
The one explanation I've heard in the flesh for the "human race will die out" argument was basically that marriage is hard - marriage being the barter transaction where men must suppress their natural urges, become civilized, and support a family (read: wife'n'kids) in exchange for sex.
So some people worry that if their sons (in particular) see homosexual relationships, up to and including marriage, they will indeed see it as an easy way out. Basically, it's just one more way to avoid the burden of having a family and get the sex anyway.
Make sense?
Didn't make sense to me either!
For starters, the whole thing seems to ignore the existence of unmarried heterosexual sex with birth control, or at least assume for some unknown reason that the homosexual relationship is very much more dangerous a temptation for some reason. Maybe because it's two men, both with the wandering urge? Dunno.
And yes, this particular anecdote was all about male-male pairs and sons.
But at that point it seemed to be that legalizing marriage would make the male-male homosexual relationship seem like a valid, sanctioned option for their sons, and that was the problem.
Indeed. And you notice how these people tend to feel about unmarried people having sex, especially if birth control is involved.
At the root of this is the idea is a 1950s sitcom-ish version of how men and women interact -- that men shouldn't actually like women and that women shouldn't actually like men, but rather that they should come together to have a family (that's the fundie reading of the Bible) ... thus, to the fundies, gays are "cheating" -- they get to have sex with their bestest same-sex friends and not have to worry about icky members of the opposite sex.
So, of course, if gay behavior were socially sanctioned, then, to the fundies, it's self-evident that everyone would want to be gay -- so all it would take is a little bit of "recruitment" (projection by evangelical Christians wont to prostelytize) to indeed make everyone go gay (in my experience, fundies have a very "post-modern" view of human sexuality as fluid).
Of course, one cannot also discount some of this rhetoric being developed by closet-cases who figure that everyone is just like them and does, in fact, primarily have same-sex attractions and is just involved with women because that's the social convention.
No kid is thinking, "I rest easy at night knowing that, two doors down, Mommy and Daddy are working on making me a baby sister." Seriously, most kids don't want to think about that.
Anyway, I work with foster children in New Jersey, and a few of them have gay foster parents. Some of them are in the process of being adopted by those foster parents. They're being taken care of a hell of a lot better than they were with their straight birth parents. I'd love for all of those NOM idiots to come by my job and meet these kids, their incompetent birth parents, and their lovely gay foster parents.
Two words came to mind when I saw this: "marriage snobs"
Seriously, they act like they're part of some exclusive club. It's almost as though they consider themselves superior because they're married. And they don't just feel superior to gays, but to unmarried couples and single parents. That's the vibe I was getting from these people.
it's really not that pretty sometimes...
I think that way too, even when it comes to healthcare reform. I think people who are against marriage equality and affordable healthcare for all are most afraid of losing some of their privilege. I guess looking down on people is a great power trip.
It's the same reasoning that caused people to support Jim Crow. As MLK (famously summarizing The Strange Career of Jim Crow) put it, "it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow."
I just watched a great movie- "For the Bible Tells Me So" that looks into homosexuality in the context of Christian Churches and what religious scholars actually believe the Bible says about gay marriage- vs- what churches preach about homosexuality. It touches on all these issues, and one of the best quotes was about homophobia being directly related to patriarchy. Basically that a homosexual man is putting himself in the position of a woman, and to these people, there is nothing worse than being a woman.
I really recommend this movie if you are interested in religion and sexuality.
"For the Bible Tells Me So" made me want to go picket Red Lobster. If shellfish are such an abomination where is Fred Phelps.
There is a scary documentary on Phelps called "Fall From Grace." The Phelps family seems to be daring the public to murder Fred. They are looking for reasons to feel victimized. The Phelps clan is responsible for an unbelievable amount of hurt.
The highlight was when the biker gang surrounded the protesters and kept revving their engines to prevent the war widow from hearing their vitriol.
I will have to look up that movie. Thanks.
There was a bummer sticker that would sum up anything I would reply to this-
"We aren't ruining your family, we are your family."