By Troy Brownfield
8.4.03
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"Raise
your hand if you're a sinner, too! Great!"
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The
Lunacy Continues
I honestly
don't understand where President Bush gets his information
anymore. His half-baked explanations of why a tax cut should
work (when we know that they won't) make about as much sense
as the family tree on Days of Our Lives. I don't get
why he thinks that the majority of the American public will
continue to buy back-pedaling on Iraq when all he needed to
say was "Hey, all other reasons aside, Iraq presented
a clear and present danger to world security, and we had to
remove it from the board for the safety of ourselves and our
allies in the region; now that we've done that, it's time
to take care of our own business, like Liberia and our own
country." (And for the record, yes, Liberia is our business;
look it up).
However,
the thing that I REALLY don't get is what gay marriage has
to do with ANYTHING. Both the president and the Pope spoke
last week about this. Let's bury the second part first: let's
make sure that all the priestly dicks are out of all the altar
boys before we let the Catholic Church comment on anybody's
sexuality, okay? Maybe when all the accused molestors are
either tried, convicted or exonerated, then MAYBE you might
be able to voice a thought. However, considering that the
culture of silence and the near-institutionalized practice
of hiding child-buggarers continues to run rampant, the Catholic
Church should just step back and shut the fuck up. And if
that's not enough for you, I've got two words: The Holocaust.
The Pope and his staff have about as much relevance to anything
going in practical society as Pong. I'm not Catholic, I don't
plan on being Catholic, a few billion other people aren't
Catholic, so let's not pretend that what the guy in the funny
hat says is important.
Bush,
however, is just baffling. I don't care if he admits that
golly, he's a sinner too. I don't care what his stance is.
That's not his job. Let me repeat that: it is not the job
of the president to care who, when or how you fuck. Why should
we care what he thinks about gay marriage? It's just another
bullshit smokescreen to throw the public off of the fact that
a) the economy still sucks, b) he's not helping it, c) no,
he really didn't have a good post-war plan in Iraq considering
that at least one American is still dying there every day,
and d) the president isn't there to adjudicate social issues.
It all
comes down to one thing: gay marriage doesn't hurt anybody.
Sure, there are some people who will throw a fit about the
"sacred" nature of marriage, but said sacrosant
rituals are based on writings that have been changed, argued
and interpreted in different ways for years. There are passages
in the Bible that condemn homosexuality, but there are also
passages that condemn Jews and the eating of certain foods.
There is no Biblical consensus; if there were, then there
would be only one branch of Christian and no alternate franchises
(Methodist, Baptist, etc.).
It's ironic
that the right is arguing against what is essentially an establishment
of family values. If a gay couple wants to commit to one another,
aren't they promoting Republican values? If a gay couple wants
to adopt, aren't they promoting the family and helping find
a place for one of thousands of missing and unwanted kids
in our own country? If a gay couple lives together, pays taxes,
and buys a home, aren't they contributing to the economy as
a familial unit? Of course, on all counts. However, vast factions
of the right are predisposed to hate gays. They use The Bible
to justify it. Kind of like the Klan used The Bible to justify
hating blacks and the Nazis used it to justify killing Jews.
My take
is this: WHY WORRY ABOUT IT? How does gay marriage hurt anyone?
For years, The Right have preoccupied themselves with what
Americans do to their bodies: "Just say no. Abortion
is bad. Being gay is wrong." And yet, they've cheerfully
supported dozens of initiatives that put America in the position
of the global aggressor while chucking every positive environmental
policy they can grab.
Frankly,
I'm just tired of the out and out hatred. There are some Americans
who still equate being gay with being a child molester; okay,
among the priesthood, that's often true. Still, a healthy
gay man or woman is only interested in other healthy gay men
or women. Why do so many people find it threatening? I'm still
amused when I hear guys say that they're worried about being
approached by gays in bars; listen m'man, nobody who's ever
said that is that good looking, and gay men are generally
WAAAAAY smarter than that.
Summing
up: as long as you aren't boning kids or collies, what we
do in the privacy of our bedroom (or our showers or the kitchen
with the curtains drawn, for that matter) has never been the
province of the president. All I ask is two things: 1) stop
hating people without justification; there's plenty of reasons
to hate people outside of their sexuality; and 2) for some
reporter to actually stand up at one of these conferences
and say, "Mr. President, stop blowing smoke up the collective
ass of America and just tell us why you're doing every domestic
thing wrong?"
It probably
won't fix the problem, but at least we'd be back on a subject
that actually matters.
Troy Brownfield is the Editor-in-Chief of Shotgun Reviews.
Email Troy at psikotyk@aol.com
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