The Gays
People’s attitudes towards homosexuality are often a great source of things for me to get all indignant about (attitudes towards atheism are another). I have two members of my immediate, nuclear family who are of alternative sexual orientations, so it’s very difficult for me to justify getting upset over the whole thing. In fact, I’m not even sure where to begin an attack on prejudice against gays.
It’s the kind of prejudice that is so lacking in any sort of rational basis that there isn’t a lot to argue against. Most people can’t seem to muster anything beyond “the Bible says so” or “it’s icky” to back up their position, and the opposing viewpoint is “these people are human beings; let’s treat them as such.” When people try to come up with more logical reasons, they seemed to inevitably wind up resorting to crazy, spurious logic. Granted, a child probably is better off by a well-adjusted man and woman, but there are entirely too many children who don’t have that privilege. I for one would much rather see a child raised by a loving gay couple than a single parent who has to work multiple jobs, one or more abusive parents, an alcoholic, or any number of other bad situations that crop up entirely too often. Gay couples don’t exactly have a lot of unplanned pregnancies after all. More importantly, the presence of a gay couple next door has absolutely nothing to do with how well one’s own affairs are going. Heterosexuals have an amazing talent for screwing up their own marriages without any intervention whatsoever from gays. Alternative lifestyles aren’t anywhere near as big a problem as people not taking marriage seriously as a long-term commitment. That, to my mind, is a much greater threat to the “sanctity of marriage.”
The thing about gay people that people constantly seem to miss is that they are first and foremost people. Apart from preferring partners of the same gender, they tend to be surprisingly like everyone else — surprisingly so because we’re used to seeing images of homosexuals portrayed as freaks. Knowing this, hate towards gays is doubly ridiculous, but then most forms of hate seemed to be stupid and irrational in the first place. Sure, there’s that weird guy and the pride parade, but they’re also gay guys who look like average football fans with beer guts — because that’s what they are.
I don’t really know what to do about all of this, since solving the problem the way I want would require making people less stupid. As for gay marriage, I would make “civil unions” the norm for everyone regardless of sexual orientation, and make “marriage” a quaint religious practice with the same legal authority as a bar mitzvah. The cynic in me doubt that will happen during my lifetime though.
