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October 15, 2003

Protesting 'Marriage Protection Week'

[NOTE:This protest was originally started for LiveJournal users (and will be posted and linked on my LiveJournal as well as here), but it's important enough, I wanted to run it here as well!]

This whole "Marriage Protection Week" thing is a farce. Marriage needs far less protection from gays than it does from people who get married and then are abusive to their spouses, have affairs, neglect their marriage in favour of their careers, abuse drugs or alcohol, gamble themselves into financial ruin or engage in other such actions that not only are the leading causes of divorce, but also do immeasurable damage to the families that we're always being told are the true foundation of American society.

It seems to me that if conservatives and other who oppose gay marriage are so worried about the damage allowing gays to marry would do to the concept of the American family, why aren't they out fighting just as hard to make adultry illegal again, or create constitutional amendments that would prevent anyone with a history of substance abuse, bankruptcy, negligence or domestic violence from being able to marry? Why don't they pass laws to prevent such people from being able to ever adopt or gain custody of their own children?

It seems to me that it would be far more important to seriously work on these problems, which we know cause marriages to fail and cause harm to children than to try and pass a Constitutional amendment to prevent something that's already illegal (though it really shouldn't be) and which hasn't been shown to have nearly as much of an impact on families as these other issues have. We've all heard about criminals who blame their crimes on having been raised by abusive or neglegent parents (of any gender or sexual persuasion), but how many have said it was because they were raised by a non-abusive gay parent?

Of course, we all know the reason that the anti-gay forces don't put nearly as much energy into preventing the known problems that end marriages and damage children as they do into preventing gay marriage is that the point really isn't about what damage letting gays marry might do to "families". The issue is simple bigotry - and this is just the excuse they've latched on to in order to try and get their laws passed.

Posted by thorswitch at October 15, 2003 08:25 PM

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