There's no question but what gay marriage is a complex subject. As I have people dear to me on both sides of the conflict, common answers like "God says so" don't sit well with me. Not because I don't believe in God or even that I disagree with the statement - it's more that the God I believe in is Science. He doesn't give arbitrary answers. So if He says that gay marriage is a bad idea (through someone I believe is a living prophet), then I need to go figure out why He said that, using the tools of logic and science that He gave me. 

As I have wrestled with this, I've been able to pin down a large part of my problem with the whole situation in this manner. 

It is true that allowing gay marriage is not going to cheapen my own marriage. It is also true that the country will not implode within 5 years of allowing gay marriage, either. The problem is that gay marriage is based on faulty logic and assumptions. In other words, we are leaping ahead of the game without dealing with the problems developed a few steps backwards, so the question of whether gay marriage is good or bad is premature. 

If I accept that gay marriage is a good thing, I must accept that it has always been a good thing and we've been slow coming to it. Rights are being trampled on and have been for thousands of years! I am not making light of this statement - there are many rights that HAVE been trampled for thousands of years that I would agree have been fixed, at least in my own nation, and at least as far as we are able. 

So I ask the question - what rights have been trampled? There is no right to marry who you love. You have a right to marry someone within the parameters that society has set, and if you love that person, so much the better! But love is not (and never has been) a right. A right can be mandated, made legally binding. How do you enshrine love as a right? We can barely define the dang word, let alone make it protected. I can ensure that you are given the right to pursue love according to the dictates of your own conscience and beliefs, but there's no way anyone can guarantee that outcome.

Summed up: we can toss the "right to marry who I love" argument out the window. It's never been a law and it never should be. I don't want my government trying to dictate to me what they think love is(n't).

So maybe there's another right that has been trampled? Perhaps the right to get certain legal benefits for my partnership. But I would stop at calling this a right. You are free to try to change the laws of the land to include your manner of partnership (changing the parameters set by society in the first place), but you must have a basis of argument to call this a right. 

At this point, the gays say, "We are a family, therefore we have a right!" According to the existing laws, they are not technically a family. Claiming they are a family and then demanding the rights given to actual lawful families leads to the next step. But what definition of "family" is being used? Not the one in our laws. Again, there is an absolute freedom to try and change the laws, but claiming to be a family needs a basis of argument. (In other words, we still haven't reached the true point of contention yet.)

So what is different between a gay family and a hetero family? The only discernible difference is sexual preference. To accept gay marriage means the acceptance that sexual preference should be protected. Here's our actual point of contention, because I see no basis for this argument. We can not logically deal with gay marriage without dealing with this critical, foundational issue first.

Anyone who believes that there is a genetic basis to protecting sexual preference needs to go to this website. I'm not saying this can't be debunked, but I am not the man to do it, so I am open to any legitimate criticisms. It makes sense to me, it's not religiously based, and all information is rigorously examined. 

(Also, by allying themselves with transsexuals, the gays have totally invalidated any true basis for defense by virtue of genetics, but I won't go into detail on this.) 


So for the sake of argument, let's toss genetics out the window. Anyone who can seriously debunk that website can reopen this issue.

If we remove genetics, what is left? Love? Nope, we already dealt with that. Tell me, what argument can be made for adding sexual preference to the list of protected statuses (statii? :) )? "I feel like it should" is obviously wrong. "People are suffering, so we need to add this to take care of them" jumps the gun - it accepts the Rightness of the result without dealing with the assumptions behind it (which is exactly what is happening, IMHO).

See, I can accept changing the laws to make it easier for people to access those seven or eight rights granted by marriage. For instance, someone is hit by a car and is in the ICU, unconscious. Only legally defined family can see them, according to the current laws. This is ridiculous - someone should be able to define legally who they want or don't want in there with them. By marrying someone, I say to society, "Hey, these people are my family." But I should be able to make a legal statement that I want my best friend allowed in there as well. 

Note that I could make that argument rationally without talking about gay marriage. Any of these rights that require an appeal to gay marriage to justify their changes need to answer the question about why sexual preference should be protected, first. No jumping the gun.

Fundamentally, I oppose sexual preference as ever being put on a protected status list, and if sexual preference is not protected, then there is no basis for gay marriage in the first place, which is why I said it's a premature question. I cannot think of a single good reason why sexual preference should be put on the same list as gender and race. Not one. When there's a good reason to discuss this, then we can talk about gay marriage. 

Recent events in my extended family have had me pondering the word love and how our society sees it. It’s one of those words that defies the best definitions as it seems to encompass much more than mere words can convey, but I think it can be easier to say what love is NOT.

I think one of the single most deceptive (and destructive) phrases in our language, relationship-wise, is “falling in love” or its converse, “falling out of love”. I blame Hollywood and many romance novels for perpetuating the myth that love equates the passionate arousal one feels when one “falls” for an attractive member of the human race, as if the love felt by couples who have been together for 40 or 50 years was somehow a genetic accident of attraction.

The word “falling” implies lack of accountability. “I can’t help falling for someone!” or “I can’t help that we fell out of love!” But true love is a choice, not a feeling. It endures long past the emotions that sexual attraction engenders, and as time passes, those committed choices generate their own feelings, similar but still distinctly different from the passion of “falling in love”.

So anyone that claims they “fell out of love” is actually saying, “I didn’t choose love for my relationship. I only wanted the passionate feelings, and when they were gone, I wanted to look somewhere else for them.” I see our society as a bunch of emotional junkies, claiming that the passionate highs (or the lows) are the substance of true enduring relationships, and so being led from one emotional high to another in a futile attempt to find “true love”.

True love is hard. It takes courage to face yourself and your partner in honest vulnerability and it takes work to overcome the natural tendency for emotional laziness. “Falling in love” takes neither courage nor work, therefore it cannot be truly called “love”. “Falling in lust” perhaps would be a better phrase since those emotions are directly tied to sexual arousal and attraction to another person.  We never “fall in love” with someone with whom sexual relations would be undesirable. “Falling in love” is utterly effortless – in fact, once we have made a commitment to another person, it takes effort to resist those feelings of attraction to an inappropriate person. But someone who believes that love is (and should be) always romantic, always effortless, will slip from one passionate relationship to another because the truth of the matter is that they crave the emotion (or the memory of that emotion), not the person. The face could change and it wouldn’t really matter, as long as the feeling is present.

All healthy relationships go through a cessation of those initial passionate feelings. It is necessary, for until this lie is exposed – the idea that true love is found in those passionate sexual attractions – then those experiencing it will never reach beyond to find the depth and power found in true commitment and love. After all, if you believe you can (and do) possess a priceless diamond with no effort, why go on a difficult quest to find another one? It isn’t until you realize that what you thought was a diamond is actually a cubic zirconium that you begin looking again. Unfortunately, many people start looking for their diamond in the same place they found their cubic zirconium, and then are shocked when they discover that this, too, is but a cheap imitation of the real thing.

You cannot find a diamond in the field of cubic zirconiums. True love is not found in passionate feelings but in a choice to make a long-term commitment. It is found in trust, and any relationship not founded on forthright trust cannot and will not succeed under any long-term circumstance. Sure, it might look the same for a while, but when the storms of life hit (and they always do), the passion will fade and the relationship will be found wanting.

Love and sex are not the same thing. Love and passion are not the same thing. Love and the feelings of love are not the same thing. Love and “falling [in/out of] love” are not the same thing. Don’t “fall” for this vicious Hollywood romance lie.

Again, I wish I had the time to reply to all the comments that have gone on so far, but with my limited time, I have to make higher level observations and comments and let everyone else fill in the gaps. I considered making this a comment, but I consider this relevant to the discussion as a whole, and so it deserves a full blog entry of its own.

I also know people are anxious for me to post my research and facts concerning gay marriage being a bad thing, but as soon as I do that, the rest of this conversation will be ignored, as if only those facts are the important thing. Since I am interested in a conversation concerning ATTITUDES about the whole experience, then those facts need to sit still for a little while longer. 

I thought long and hard about this while I was on vacation, because it seems to me that the supporters of each side are coming from a frame of reference that the other side simply doesn’t get. All of the arguments presented by tongodeon  so far are sound, but I’ve been able to detect something missing without being able to pinpoint exactly what it was. It was this comment, my response, and then his response (from a different blog post before I left for Mexico) that gave me the key, and led me to a critical question I need to ask.

I'll wait while you read 'em...

Wanna know what was missing? To me, God is a living Being, a loving figure who guides and directs me. When I talk about what God wants me to do, I’m speaking of a figure beyond and not limited to the Bible. To many of the supporters of gay marriage, God and the Flying Spaghetti Monster are identical – imaginary beings that cannot (or will not) prove their existence and demand blind faith in their teachings from their followers. To them the Bible is merely a book full of good ideas, crazy teachings, bad doctrinal conflicts, and irrelevant stories. One piece of the Bible that happens to hit right does not give the whole Bible credit, whereas I speak of a living being who generates personal credibility in His directions and guidance. To me, if one of the nutty stories in the Bible does not match with what I know about God, then either it’s been translated incorrectly or I’m misunderstanding God’s nature, but either way, I’m led to my understanding of the living being BEHIND the story rather than being forced to focus on the story itself. Understanding God’s character is at the heart of my scripture readings. If this conversation was with fellow believers who supported gay marriage, it would be going down a very VERY different path, but since it’s not, this foundational problem is at the core of our disagreement.

If God and the FSM are equivalents, then ALL faith is blind faith, and ALL religious beliefs that conflict with what a large portion of society wants are irrational, unreasonable, bigoted, and intolerant. So here’s my question: can anyone reading this who supports gay marriage think of a single instance of faith (being defined as following a commandment of God as they understand it without having reasons behind said commandment) that they would NOT consider blind faith? I’ll be very surprised if even one example can be brought up, though judging by the very sharp minds involved, I’m prepared to be surprised. :)

Is it clear what I’m getting at? If ALL religious faith is blind faith, and blind faith is a terrible reason to oppose gay marriage, then no matter what I say, I will always be a religious bigot to those that see religion in this way. If the FSM and God are the same type of invisible sky fairy, then a religious belief proscribing a particular behavior is ALWAYS bigotry, rather than a valid way to live life, because listening to delusional would-be prophets is idiocy rather than respectable. 

Here’s the other side of the story, the side of the believers. The difference between God and the FSM is the difference between a high-def plasma widescreen TV and a large cardboard box with a hole cut out of it where the screen would be - superficially similar, but lacking all the critical components to actually function. The FSM has never, cannot now, and will never be able to answer prayers and intercede on behalf of its believers.  Ever. Under any circumstance. The Bible is only a record of how God has worked with His children in the *past*, and it’s been translated and retranslated so many times that the pure essence of God’s word has been diminished – if this were not true, there wouldn’t be over a thousand different Christian denominations all claiming to be based in the Bible but having drastically different precepts.

But I have my own personal Bible, so to speak. In my own life, I have a list of answered prayers, moments of absolute clarity, revelations, and miracles great and small – some of these excruciatingly personal – that is so long, I cannot even recall a fraction of them. Some of them, individually, are strong enough to convince me of God’s existence and love for me all by themselves, and some of them, individually, could just as easily be explained by coincidence, but all of them together create a flood of absolute certainty in His existence, love, and attention to His children. To us, faith is only blind if the person asking for your faith has no personal credibility. But following God’s commands to the best of my ability is not blind faith because the One leading me has proven Himself over and over again in a very real, tangible way. Strip away the books and the structure of religion and I still have literally hundreds upon hundreds (maybe thousands) of these personal experiences.

It’s like a piano student giving credibility to her teacher – though she may not truly comprehend how the exercises and drills she has to do will lead her to play the beautiful music of Bach, she does it anyway because the teacher has credibility. How is credibility gained? By following the instructions and seeing, AFTER the fact, that the instructor was correct. (Christ spoke of this in John 7:16-17 when He said, “My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me. If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.”) So as the piano student follows the instructions of the person she has given enough credibility to that she will obey without needing explanations about every single step along the way, she will see her ability to play grow and blossom. With hindsight, she will see much more clearly how the drills and exercises prepared her for the complexity of Bach, and the credibility of her teacher grows along with her skills. When the teacher gives her a drill, she will do it without needing to know exactly what that drill will accomplish because her teacher has already been proven to be credible, and she trusts that her teacher wouldn’t give her a drill that wasn’t for her own good.

So tell me, is this blind faith? Is she wrong to trust her teacher who has proven himself because he doesn’t explain the exact purpose behind every single drill?

To the non-believer, God has zero credibility. To the believer, He has ultimate credibility. If a believer does something because of the credibility he has given God, thus not requiring God to explain Himself before obedience, he is labeled as having blind faith and being a bigot because – as I said above – to the non-believer ALL faith is blind faith since God is no different from the FSM. The non-believer cannot conceive of willingly giving himself over to a power that he cannot see, touch, taste, hear, or smell. As long as the believer’s tenets do not conflict with the non-believer’s life, the NB is happy to let the B do his own little crackpot religious thing.

But as soon as the B’s crackpot religious beliefs conflict with the way the NB feels the world should work, then the names start flying – the NB gets called fun things like “heretic” and the B gets called fun things like “bigot”. THIS is my basic problem with the whole system. As long as neither side is willing to grant respect to the other side, all that is getting accomplished is hard feelings and name calling.

Us: I'm against gay marriage because I believe God wants me to be.

Them: That's ridiculous. Give me a REAL reason.

Us: But that IS a real reason.

Them: No, it's not.

Us: Heretic!

Them: Bigot!

Just so I’m clear up front – my goal is (and was) NOT to have a conversation about whether gay marriage is bad or good (at least, not yet). Some of the points will be relevant to that issue, but my underlying point of contention is different – my argument is that opposing gay marriage does not automatically make one a bigot. Obviously, there are hateful, bigoted people who voted for prop 8, but the vast majority of people who voted against gay marriage in the 30 out of 30 states where this has come to a fair vote were not.

As I have presented this idea, the main challenges have been that by not putting forth my reasons for opposing gay marriage first, the jury is still out on whether I’m actually a bigot. As tongodeon says:

I think you're still putting the horse before the cart. You're begging the question. *You* understand that there are more points than the question of love, but Olbermann and I don't yet. All the other reasons I'm aware of - tradition, semantics, school curricula, slippery slope polygamy - seem to be bogus reasons, and therefore that *is* all there is to the debate right now.

No, there IS more to the debate. Bigotry is an ATTITUDE. I could have tons of solid facts about gay marriage being bad, and I could still be a bigot. Similarly, the only reason I might have for opposing it might be that I believe that God wants me to, and I wouldn’t be a bigot.

Bigotry has to do with how I feel towards the people who are involved with what I oppose. It is possible to oppose an action as reprehensible while not opposing the individual(s) who commit that action. Example: I oppose theft. If my brother stole a car and was placed in prison, I would rightfully oppose his actions, but I would never oppose HIM personally. I would continue to love him as my brother, visit him in prison, and do everything in my power to help him past the consequences of his actions, while at no time approving of what he did to land himself there. (I’m not implying that homosexuality is a crime – don’t take the analogy farther than it is meant to be.)

Here’s the danger – as soon as you attach the PERSON to the ACTION, then opposing one automatically means opposing the other, which is my basic problem with the general thrust of the gay marriage movement. This is plainly seen in the blogs, comments and pickets signs that proclaim “No to Prop H8!” By calling it Prop H8, this imposes the gay movement’s perspective on those that oppose them, as if their perspective is the only valid one. Gay marriage supporters are shouting to the world, "They hate gays!" Except they don't. Those that promote the idea that Prop 8 was really Prop H8 are guilty of the very same bigotry they claim they are trying to stop, and anyone who subscribes to the Prop H8 concept has lost any moral high ground in the debate.

Of course, if the goal is to win no matter what, then that's fine. But anyone who wants to claim the stance of a fair-minded, tolerant individual cannot drop a blanket character judgment on those who happen to do something they don't like.

Sadly, if the gay movement is guilty of this, they have had good teachers. Ask almost any LGBT person, and they will be able to relate 1st or 2nd hand stories about being judged, mistreated, and attacked in some way by those who claim religion as their moral foundation. This is not a one way street – religious people who attach the action (homosexuality) to the person who does it have committed the same grave error I accuse anyone who supports the Prop H8 concept of committing.

It would be a misrepresentation to claim that either side is made up entirely of people who think this way, yet this faulty logic is seen at the core of both positions. Until we get past this false connection, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to have an open, rational discussion of the ideals at stake.

Just as this applies to the personal level, it applies on the societal level. As I said in my last post, I am free to disagree with the social and political agenda of the gays without hating the individuals involved in it. Supporters of gay marriage have every legal right to be as bigoted as Fred Phelps, but they have no moral right to be so, and when they implicate that they understand my motives or attitudes towards LGBT people because I oppose their cause, they have crossed the line and become the mirror image of the truly bigoted religious folk.

Let me take this a step further. Pretend that I am a simple person who believes in God, but doesn’t understand or follow all of the complex arguments back and forth concerning the issue. I have friends who are gay, and I love them dearly, but my religious beliefs tell me to vote against the social change of gay marriage. Let’s assume because I am unable to give any reason other than my religious beliefs, I am judged to be a bigot.

Now assume that I similarly have religious beliefs, but I CAN give other reasons besides my religion, and therefore prove myself through logic and reason to not be a bigot.

Can anyone see the real problem here? Religious reasons for opposing the gay marriage initiative are judged to be bigotry automatically. I have to come up with reasons above and beyond my religion to prove myself NON-bigoted, as if religious beliefs and hatred of individuals are 100% correlated. That, my friends, is what we call anti-religious bigotry. If someone is judged as a bigot for merely voting according to their religious beliefs and no other reason, then faith is being valued less than lack of faith, and what’s more, a hostile motive or attitude is being ascribed to that person when it is more than likely that no such attitude exists in that person. It’s fine to value logic and reason, but don’t call yourself fair-minded or moral if you attack all religious beliefs that oppose gay marriage as being bigoted and hateful for the mere reason that they are faith based rather than non-faith based.