Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that anti-discrimination legislation for LGBT people is the next battle to fight after the Supreme Court effectively legalized same-sex marriage. “There are 32 states where you can be married in the morning and fired in the afternoon,” he told a crowd at a New York event hosted by the Freedom to Marry group. “This next door is gonna be a hell of a lot easier to open.” In addition, he called the total fight for LGBT equality “the civil-rights issue of our generation.” Biden told the story of his father seeing a gay couple and telling him “they love each other, it’s simple.” Evan Wolfson, the founder of Freedom to Marry, who interned for Biden in the 1980s, credited him with stopping Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, which gave way to Anthony Kennedy’s nomination. Kennedy was the deciding vote and author of the majority opinion in the same-sex ruling last month.
One of the aspects of humanity I struggle to comprehend is our collective proclivity towards hatred. The easy and short version is that we fear and hate what we don’t understand, and we attempt to repress and/or destroy something or someone when what we don’t understand is perceived as a threat. Perhaps it’s just a vestige of the ethic of our caveman forebears, for whom waiting and pondering could easily mean destruction and/or death.
Here in the 21st century, humanity hasn’t caught up with the reality that threats are things like weapons, explosives, and people who want to harm us- not ideas, beliefs, or how one chooses to live and/or love. There’s absolutely no reason why your beliefs should inform those of anyone else…or vice-versa. There’s no reason why someone else’s sexuality, lifestyle, and/or who they choose to commit to in a loving relationship could or should be seen as a threat- to anything. It simply defies logic for someone to wholeheartedly believe that marriage equality could possibly have a deleterious effect on their own marriage. If marriage equality does irreparably harm your marriage, either you or your spouse (or both) may not be as 100% heterosexual as you’d previously thought.
How can someone else’s marriage adversely impact your own? No matter how I might try to understand it, I just can’t wrap my head around the idea that someone else’s marriage- whatever form it might take- could harm my own. If I’m taking care of my own business and they’re taking care of theirs, how could their relationship impact mine? Or vice-versa? The short answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. And can’t. IF you oppose marriage equality, that’s your right in our free society. What you don’t have the right to do is to transmogrify your opinions, beliefs, prejudices, and/or fears into something that allows you to define parameters for what a marriage must look like and who is worthy of it.
If you oppose same-sex marriage, don’t marry someone of the same sex. Problem solved. That’s where your rights and influence ends, though. No longer do governments have the legal right to deny the right to marry to those they deem “less than”- not that some aren’t taking the opportunity to demagogue the issue (Et tu, Judge Roy Moore??)
The sky has not fallen since gay couples started getting married on June 26, and it won’t fall tomorrow or next year either. Traditional marriage will be just fine (or at least, its demise won’t be the gays’ fault). No one is forcing a church to do anything they don’t want to do. No one is really abridging anyone’s religious freedom. And only 5 to 10 percent of Americans are gay; same-sex marriage just won’t affect most people’s lives.
Thus, it’s entirely possible that in a few years, we’ll wonder how anyone could have opposed marriage equality, just as today it’s hard to imagine supporting segregated schools. And if Republican leaders insist on tainting their brand by doing so, well, more power to them.
So, conservatives, bring on the backlash. The only ones you’re hurting are yourselves.
That’s the thing about hate. Ultimately, the only person really being hurt is the hater. The person(s) being hated can simply ignore the haters- and they should, because they’re irrelevant and of no value.
Love is easy and light. Love sows loves, which it reaps amply in return. Hatred is a heavy burden, and it slowly chokes any affection for life and humanity off. Hatred hardens hearts and destroys the ability to feel compassion, and it enables and justifies discriminating against groups or individuals deemed as “less than” or somehow offensive.
During my childhood, hatred of African-Americans existed in ample measure throughout the South and, perhaps somewhat less openly, throughout the rest of the country. Most Americans can look back at that period in our history and understand how sick and misguided that sort of racism was…and is.
In our free country, an American is free to love (or hate) whomever they may choose. That decision is where an individual’s influence ends. That preference and/or prejudice can have no legal or moral impact on another individual who may make a different choice.
“They love each other, it’s simple” is a simple way to live and acknowledge that each of us are free to live and love as we choose. Hatred and prejudice should have no part in that equation. In 50 years or so, I suspect Americans will look back and wonder how so many could hate so thoroughly in the name of Jesus Christ- the same Christ who preached love, tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion.
In the end, marriage equality will only make us stronger as a nation as we learn that different doesn’t equal bad, and that same-sex marriage is no different from “traditional” marriage. We all want someone to lean on; some of us just look in different places to find that.
Live and let live, eh? To this day, I’m thankful to my parents for teaching me that one simple lesson. Would that more of us could do the same.
