I don't think one single thing you just said was true. The fight for homosexual rights has not been fought by seeking confrontation, it has been met with confrontation. The disrespect and insult you speak of came entirely from the fact that so many people disrespect and insult homosexuals. Gay people are perfectly happy letting others be straight, but religious people were in now way going to allow people to be gay, let alone afford them equal right under the law. That hostility is what has fueled this fire. It came entirely from those who appose homosexuality. And people don't get equal right without an "in your face" approach. You think black people would be voting right now if they stood in the background quietly asking for it, instead of marching on the capital demanding their rights? And you truly are ignorant if you believe your statement about the tolerance of homosexuality 20 years ago? Your responses have become more and more outlandish and utterly incomprehensible. I feel now I am no longer speaking to a person of reasonable intelligence, but rather to one who believes what he is told only when it agrees with a preconceived belief. I see now your religious roots have great influence on your ways of thinking. You may not be religious, but your blind faith in matters despite overwhelming logical and factual rebuttals can only be remnants of a religious upbringing. Stop thinking from others and start thinking for yourself. Find out for yourself the basis of your arguments and facts, instead of mindlessly rambling off arguments that are simply there because they were put there by an overwhelming belief in texts and arguments that have no actual basis in reality.
Let's see -- you were 6 twenty years ago; I was at college living with a house full of 'evangelical' guys. And you know what? Near half of them, back then, were quite willing to grant gays every legal benefit and privilege heteros get -- if gays just would stop insisting on polluting something sacred by asking for marriage.
It's that request that I refer to as disrespect, and it's a disrespect shown on JUB in abundance.
Blacks never did anything to whites, as a policy, anywhere near gays asking for marriage does to many, many religious believers. I keep saying, hoping people will decide to reach for an understanding of whom they're fighting, that demanding that man + man = man + woman is like deliberately walking into their homes and pissing on the floor -- except worse. By demanding the label "marriage", gays continue to insist on confrontation, without even bothering to think of, or care about, the insult and disrespect and despite they are offering.
I have no blind faith here. Blind faith would accept the false worldview of gay activists who happily trumpet their disdain for anything that doesn't praise them. From religious people I know, I know for a fact that among them, there would never be a need for a Proposition 8 because if gays sought something that would apply to everyone in terms of civil benefits, and left marriage to the churches, it would have been in the law years ago. Even a fundamentalist pastor down the street agrees -- and agrees that the government shouldn't have any say over marriage in the first place, since that belongs to God and not Caesar.
And many Christians do respect the Constitution, and if offered the chance to take marriage out of the law so that everyone could have equal rights, they would approve. Of course they'd then have to argue with certain fellow Christians over marrying gays in their churches, or having gay preachers, but it would be the religious arguing with the religious, not the religious trying to keep a religious definition dominant in secular life.
A clincher to this argument built on my experience, as well as my belief that liberty is the American dream, is that I actually met a (hawt!) guy at a gay bar -- who was a member of an Assembly of God type church, firm in his belief that all the gay guys present were on their way to Hell, but also firm that they were no threat to him (so long as we didn't touch him improperly), or his upcoming marriage, so long as they didn't try to ram homosexuality into marriage where it didn't belong. Civil unions with all the same benefits? Fine with him -- but it wouldn't keep gays from going to Hell.
I don't think I'd gotten quite as far as conceiving that marriage should be returned to the churches, back then, but that's just a logical step from where he was at, and the guys I lived with at college, and other religious folk I've known: it isn't the benefits and privileges they don't want to grant, it's the sacred label.
And if we can't be respectful enough to honor their sensibilities when there's a very simple, and quite constitutional remedy, then we don't deserve a one of those benefits.
