MikeyOpp.com

Here in California, a fierce battle is being waged by the Mormons from Utah alongside the self righteous bigots of California against the people who believe that personal decisions are best left up to the individual, and not the law.

I don’t think I could use a more biased introduction to my position concerning California’s Proposition Eight; a Proposition to place a state-wide ban on Gay Marriage, but that is because sometimes in order to make a point, you have to use the same language as your opponent.

First of all, a necessary concession must be made: Despite my anal retentive tendencies, my lack of a long term girlfriend, and my hippie-dippie-you-gotta-love-everyone attitude; I am not gay. But just because I don’t have any personal motivation for standing up for gay rights does not mean that I am okay with standing by as a group of my fellow citizens are being deprived of a basic legal right. I think that the fact that I am not gay is the greatest reason for me to dedicate a column to gay rights, because in America it often seems necessary for the majority to stand up for minority rights.

Look, people, from where I sit, this issue is pretty darn simple. Gay people just want the same things the rest of us do; equal protection under the law, equal opportunities to chase the American dream, and of course, they want to turn all of your children gay, so that they can turn our entire culture into a culture of queers…oh wait, no they don’t, that would be absurd—but that seems to be the main reason driving hordes of bigots to every major street corner of the bay area in order to demand and coerce Californians to impose a ban that attempts to make gay people “of a different class” than straight people.

But all I can think, when I see these ignorant bigots waving “Yes on 8!” banners is: Who cares? WHO CARES?! One more time: WHO REALLY GIVES A ____?”

I mean, really. Straight people engage in sexually deviant, degrading, and demeaning acts all the time, behind closed doors, and we all know this to be true. We know it’s true because our scandal detectors (the mainstream media) are always RIGHT THERE to break any story of a famous person who has been caught doing anything sexual besides having sex with their wife in the standard missionary position while holding a rosary in one hand, and American flag in the other, in order to procreate.

Can’t we all just get along? I reiterate my “homerun point:” Who cares? Why on Earth does anyone care about a gay couple wanting to marry, when our economy has gone to hell, our moral standards concerning altruism are non-existent, we’re on the precipice of a third world war, our current president makes Dan Quayle look like Albert Einstein, and children can barely read and write; but no one has seemed to notice, because we’re all so busy text messaging and surfing the internet on our blackberries, that all we can seem to do with our election cycle is to look for a new class to “put down.”

You see, vis-à-vis my understanding and studies of American history, I have learned that American history has always had one ugly theme after another, running alongside its so called “progress.” This would be the theme of “putting some minority group down in order to elevate the self esteem of the majority.”

With Tuesday’s statistically likely impending election of Barack Obama, an African American, as president of the United States of America, I see this moment as the official bridge between most Americans accepting blacks as an equal group in our society, and choosing instead to put all of their formerly bigoted efforts against blacks into hating the “new” lesser class; gay Americans.

America first justified killing Native Americans, because they weren’t as ‘intellectually and culturally advanced’ as the European settlers were. We next embraced the idea of traveling thousands of miles to a foreign continent, stealing the strongest men and women from that land, imprisoning them on a ship, and then enslaving the survivors of those voyages in order to promote a better economy.

But then, a strange and seemingly miraculous thing happened: The national conscience began to shift, and some people began to question the morality of trading small pox for land, and trading slavery for a bigger profit.

I don’t really want to explore something that I assume all of my readers are well educated on; namely the fact that for hundreds of years, America looked the other way in order to excuse extremely cruel policies that benefited those of us who were not of a minority.

But we must draw this parallel, if we are to see the truly ugly side of banning gay marriages. So here we are now, in the year two thousand and eight, and despite the abolition of slavery and the establishment of special reservation rights for Native Americans (which is hardly fair…), we’re still active in our efforts to try and segregate a part of our population; we’re still attempting to keep certain members of our society down.

I don’t understand how any self-informed adult can see an attempt to ban gay marriage as anything short of bigoted, and therefore, as a truly confounding notion. There is nothing at stake with the legal recognition of gay marriage except for a bunch of homophobic people attempting to shamelessly legislate their own morality.

If you think for a second that same-sex friends are going to flippantly marry one another in order to save money on taxes, you are crazy. And don’t even try to tell me that gay people don’t need the right to marry, because our society already tolerates homosexuality. The fact that gay marriage is such a big issue in our national dialogue sheds a gigantic spotlight on our nation’s bigoted attitude and intolerance of gay people.

Look, if you want our American government to legislate morality, meaning you believe that the law should do things like prevent gays from marrying, then in my opinion, you support an intolerant government that uses its power to restrict people of certain personal freedoms, as opposed to granting its populace the freedom to explore life so long as said exploration does not infringe on another citizen’s life or property.

Yup, it’s pretty simple in my world. It’s fairly black and white, actually. You are either tolerant, or you are not. And if you are intolerant, then in my opinion, and this is the nicest way I can phrase this; you are spreading negativity into our world, and I’m disappointed in you for stooping to such a low level of humanity. And I hope if you are intolerant, that you someday end up on the other side of your “intolerance stick” and you realize the intense psychological harm that your intolerance inflicts on so many of your fellow Americans.

We were founded as a nation in order to provide mankind with a haven for freedoms. We designed a constitution along with a carefully balanced system of federalism in order to try and procure for future generations (that’s us, people!) as many inalienable rights and basic freedoms as possible. And I can only presume that our founding fathers created this system in order to allow for the progress of not just civilization, but also the progress of an intelligent and rational approach to government.

Only now, we seem to be hell-bent on attempting to use our constitution to deprive people of their right to make personal choices—and it’s not just dangerous and downright mean, but it’s absolutely inane as well.

And so I ask you, if you oppose gay marriage; how can a gay marriage possibly infringe on your right to the pursuit of happiness? How does gay marriage infringe your personal liberty? And my final question: How on Earth does gay marriage infringe on your right to life?

I am attempting to be the least coy and the most vocal that I’ve ever been in the history of writing this column, and it’s because I am stunned by how many people seem to earnestly wish that gay people remain second class citizens, and this attitude makes me want to revoke my allegiance to my own nation. I don’t care if you privately hate 99% of this population, so long as you don’t act in a way that harms the people you hate—for that is the basic premise of your right to privacy. I think it is self defeating to do this, but by all means, as a free citizen of our nation, go ahead and hate and fear anything you want to, in the privacy of your own mind. But for the sake of all that is good and reasonable, leave your hate at home when it comes to constitutional rights.

I do not wish to live in nor do I wish to support any intolerant society. Tolerance is a very easy concept to understand, and it is an imperative concept to practice every day of your life. Intolerance undermines most of our world’s wars and intolerance also undermines a large portion of American crime. So if you oppose war and crimes of hatred, then you better recognize the importance of being tolerant of others.

Intolerance is also very nasty and counterproductive. And this is because intolerance makes those who are not ‘tolerated’ feel bad about themselves, which contradicts the whole point of forming a society. For one of the purposes of a society is to improve the moral of mankind so that we can pursue and achieve the many great things we desire for ourselves.

So it’s okay to think your private thoughts. Those are for you to indulge in whenever you want to, and anyone and everyone should grant “you” that right. But your personal right to hate or fear homosexuals, while stupid and nonsensical to me, does NOT warrant a national policy of intolerance towards gay Americans.

Being tolerant of gay people does not mean that you approve of their lifestyle, or that you want to know anything about it. All it means to be tolerant of gay people is that you afford them the same basic rights that you demand for yourself. So I hope that on this Election Day, if you have any proposals on your ticket to deprive a minority of a right that you freely indulge in, I sincerely hope that you’ll think about the fact that being a “Real American” means being an adult about social issues, and it means practicing tolerance, no matter what your personal opinion may be.

And for those of you who are still full of hatred and fear, I’ll appeal to these irrational emotions of yours: Even “straight bigots” can produce gay children, so be careful who you choose to hate. And yes, I realize the situational irony that arises from my own intolerant attitude towards intolerance!