Reacting to the California Supreme Court's decision overturing a same-sex marriage ban, the far right group Campaign for Children and Families compares county clerks issuing same-sex marriage licenses to Nazis gassing Jews during the Holocaust. Here's what they say on their website, SaveCalifornia.com: Ask your county clerk if they were a Nazi officer during WWII and had been ordered to gas the Jews, would they? At the Nuremberg trials, they would have been convicted of murder for following this immoral order.
I sometimes wonder what it is that could drive one person to hate another simply because of who they are and the way they choose to lead their life. What is it that allows them to be so completely and thoroughly convinced of their own moral rectitude that they see nothing wrong with allowing themselves to become completely consumed with such hatred? What could possibly possess a normally lucid, sensible person to harbor such a level of hatred and vitriol that they would feel completely justified in equating support of gay marriage with the Holocaust?
I cannot even begin to put in the words the antipathy I feel for those consumed with such unreasonable and unsupportable hatred for those whose only crime is in wanting to be left alone to enjoy the same legal rights and privileges that "straight" Americans enjoy. Apparently, some see nothing amiss with the idea of continuing to forcibly treat human being guilty of simply wanting to be able to live their lives as second-class citizens.
Look, if you oppose gay marriage, I have a simple solution for you: don't have one. What, really, is so wrong with the simple idea of live and let live? Why (and how) does your narrow, fear-based ignorance give you the absolute right to treat another human being as somehow less worthy than you? The reality is that it doesn't and shouldn't. Still, when the level of debate on this issue rises no higher than this, what hope do we really have of ever learning to live together despite our differences?
Then again, I suppose it's easier to hate than to find ways to make your own existence more meaningful, worthwhile, and joyful, eh?
