So we're over a week since the Supreme Court weighed in and made it legal nationwide for gays to marry, and the repercussions are still...repercussing. Some on the right are calling for the people in favor to be magnanimous in victory and nice to those poor folks who lost the case, which strikes me as a bit twee. This isn't the end of a playoff series in the NHL, where the two teams line up for a series of handshakes before one team gets ready for its next round in the playoffs and the other just goes home for the summer. This was a deeply serious struggle that took many, many, many years to come to this point, and it was a struggle that has seen gays literally demonized, literally killed and jailed for their beliefs and desires to live their lives. Hearing people on the right crying out "Please be nice to us now that you've won" don't do much for me when I remember what happened to Matthew Shepard and Alan Turing.
And those cries of "Be nice to us, now" sure as hell don't do much for me when I go on Facebook and see this:
The spilling of blood.
The person who posted this seems to be literally calling for some kind of civil and religious war to get things back to the "way they should be", with gays firmly shoved back in the closet so we don't have to know about them at all while they live their disgusting, immoral, hedonistic lives.
The spilling of blood.
This makes me want to ask a bunch of questions.
We've already spilled blood on this. Shepard, for instance. Turing. Every gay person who died of AIDS while Ronald Reagan ignored the problem. (And let's not pretend those aren't the same thing. It all comes together. It's all about treating gays as what they are: people.)
Whose blood needs to be spilled?
Will there be Christian fundamentalist suicide bombers, detonating themselves in the middle of gay weddings?
Will there be states attempting secession again, this time over their "right" to subjugate and dehumanize another group of people?
Will some town or county or state become so defiant that the President is forced to deploy the National Guard to escort gays to their own weddings? Will those National Guardsmen be fired upon?
Are we calling for the assassination of the five Supreme Court justices who voted this way? If so, why stop there? Before the ruling, gay marriage was legal in many states because of decisions in lower courts. Are those judges to be placed against the execution wall? What about the states where marriage was legalized through legislative action? Should every person who ever cast a vote in favor of gay marriage in any state legislature be placed against the same wall?
Whose blood will be spilled? Where, and why? And will you be willing to spill your blood for this noble cause?
And if so, will you for the love of God think about what that says?
Then there are my other questions, which mainly revolve around this one: WHY IS THIS SO BIG A DEAL TO YOU???
Does the Bible say negative things about homosexuality? It does seem to...but there's something about the way it says it, isn't there? It's not entirely clear that the writers of those ancient texts are referring to quite the same thing that we are, in our day. If God feels so strongly about homosexuality and "marriage equals one man and one woman", you'd think he would have managed to get that into that list of Commandments. Instead, it gets relegated to other parts of the Bible, along with all manner of other stuff that we willingly ignore.
So why is homosexuality in general, and gay marriage in particular, so important? What makes this prohibition from Leviticus the one that must be obeyed unto death, up to and including the spilling of blood? Why this, and not the eating of shellfish or getting tattoos or Wal-Mart being open on Sunday or the bit about how if your teenager is rebellious the proper thing to do is drag her outside so your neighbors can stone her?
What is so awful about this law in a book full of laws you completely ignore that it must be obeyed to the point of overruling those Ten Commandments that seem to be the things God really really really wants us to not be doing?
"We must be ready to spill blood in order to prevent people from loving in a way that stands in opposition to my selective reading of a text written thousands of years ago by an agrarian people in a desert country on the other side of the world, all because of my personal belief that said text was inspired by God."
That may be the single craziest sentence I have ever written. And that's saying something.
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