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What About Props 1, 2, and 102?

November 20th, 2008
By ELYAS BAKHTIARI

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I’m seeing a lot of petitions going around here on the East coast in reaction to Prop 8, which banned gay marriage in California, most with vague calls to “repeal Prop 8″ and no specific indication of how or even to whom the petition will ultimately be sent. Young liberals are fired up and ready to fight for gay rights, but for the most part the movement seems directionless and unorganized.

There’s something about the intense focus on Prop 8 that bugs me, though. I agree with the principles, but I can’t help but wonder if we’d seem the same passion for gay rights if Prop 8 hadn’t passed. What about Prop 1 in Arkansas, which essentially banned gays from adopting, or Prop 2 in Florida and Prop 102 in Arizona, which also banned gay marriage? These equally-repressive amendments have been all but overlooked by liberals outside of the respective states. I understand the symbolism of Prop 8 and the unique circumstance in which gay marriage had previously been legal in California. But I’m also a bit unsettled by liberals’ indifference to the rights of gays in the “flyover” states. If we’re talking about a civil rights issue, shouldn’t the amendments in Florida, Arkansas, and Arizona be just as offensive as the one in California?

Is this just smugness from the blue coasts? “Why campaign for gay rights in Arkansas and Arizona? It’s just red states being red states, right?” Or is it because of the lack of leadership? For the most part, the part-time activists don’t seem to have a clear idea of what they want to accomplish. Is their goal simply to repeal Prop 8? If so, they’re missing the bigger picture and the movement is nothing more than a passing fad. I assume most people concerned about Prop 8 also, deep down, care about gay rights in all states. Even so, no one seems to have an idea for how to achieve that, so they’re making a stand in California.

Now is the perfect time for gay rights activists to develop clearer goals. Should they fight marriage amendments state by state? Is a national solution eventually the answer? If so, how? The courts? Federal legislation? The answer isn’t to model a movement after the protests and petitions of the 1960s; the model is the Obama campaign. Reach out to red states and religious organizations, rather than help drive the wedge further. Donate money and time, even if in small amounts. That’s how you bring about change these days.



This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 11:54 am and is filed under Moral Values, Social Conservatives, Family, Hypocrisy, California, Arizona, Gay Rights, Florida, Mormons, Christian Conservatives, Society, Religion, 2008 Elections, Minorities, GLBT Issues, Religious Right, Roman Catholics, Evangelicals, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    The difference between Prop 8 and all of the other anti-equal rights laws/amendments is that Prop 8 removed rights already obtained.
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    I understand the arguments on both sides of the fence. On the one hand you have two people of the same sex who love each other deeply. Yet on the other hand you have people wanting to define sex as to exist only between men and women. I loved my grandmother very deeply...as deep as you possibly can. Yet I never felt compelled to have sex with her or to marry her. *shudder*. My sexuality was oriented towards men. It truly is about "orientation", in every aspect of the word.

    I think the whole phenomenon of being gay is a little hard to understand. I think there may be some people with legitmate hormone imbalances from birth that cause them to be attracted to the same sex. But I also think there are a much wider group of people who have adopted gayness as an impressed behavior. Many people who I know to be gay have admitted to a sexual encounter at an impressionable age of a same-sexed, almost always older or adult perpetrator.

    I work with animals breeding. You have to be careful about imprinting breeding behaviors on your young animals. They literally can be trained to mount or accept mounting from anything, even inanimate objects as with AI (artificial insemination) where bulls, boars, stallions etc. are trained to mount dummies. Some will from then on only prefer mounting dummies making them ".Objectum-sexuals and probably subject to their own "rights" movement in their human counterparts...of which exists folks... And once that training is in place, the urges go into auto-pilot and the behavior is set in stone. You can lose many a good breeding stallion or buck or bull that way to same-sexed preference. Ask any rancher about this phenomenon.

    If females have access to only females in a herd, they will start mounting each other in frustration. This is especially common in pigs. Some of them will from then on only accept mounting from another female and will attack a male if he tries to "do his thing".

    So gayness, IMHO, is potentially both of birth origin, that which I call "true gays" and also of learned origins, that which I call "behavioral gays". The problem is sorting out who is who. And even bigger problems sorting out how we want the definition of marriage to apply to learned behaviors that may not be that person's original sexual (potential) orientation.

    ie: if we "normalize" something that does not wholly have origins in immutable DNA, and is instead highly suspected a behavioral phenomenon, then we are mutating our very description of what is normal sexual behavior...and passing on that mutation, since primates like us are "learn-by-example" animals, to future generations via social learning... Some people think this is fantastic. Other people think is teaches young people the wrong thing.

    Some homosexuality also seems to be enmeshed rather unsavorily into child predation and imprinting sexuality. Many young girls molested by men grow up to be extremely promiscuous and equate love with sex due to this assault to their growing personas. Promiscuous gays are made from the same cloth so-to-speak. Do we then normalize extreme promiscuity? Do we teach that to our children as "perfectly normal and acceptable"? After all, I know several of these women as adults who become enraged and just as uppity and defensive of their promiscuity as "normal" if it is challenged by another as abnormal..

    I don't think we should normalize extreme promiscuity, for many health reasons if for nothing else.

    So I guess the bottom line is that before we go on a big crusade for some concept, I think we really need to get to the bottom of understanding it before we assign a label of "normal" to it. Human sexuality is one big morass of intertwined DNA predisposition, impression, social learning, mallealbility, hormones and probably a dozen other things I don't know about and few others do.

    Do I think we should descriminate against anyone's sexual orientation when it comes maltreatment? Certainly not. Because as a rancher I can tell you that it is FIXATED IN STONE once it's solidly in place...and that is not always at birth and may include a complex set of occurances during a time when a young person's (animal's) mind and hormonal intricacies are still in formation. On the other hand should we go all the way to the other end of the spectrum and set an example for future generations to aspire to an affected fixation, there by "mistreating" them by assenting to mutate the original definition of sexuality for procreation by errant example ? No, I don't think that should happen either.

    Yes, it is the "don't ask, don't tell" argument. And yet not allowing to ask provides protection for the rights and civil enjoyments of privacy for those who are gay. It helps prevent mistreatment. Asking gays not to advertise by "telling" is protection for our youth from undue coercion to affiliate one way or another.

    And yes, some gays are highly coercive. Many dykes I know (virtually every one) are promiscuous, predatory and think of "converting" straight women to lesbianism as a fun sport. I've heard gay men talk about converting boys. (why do they aspire to "convert" someone's supposed DNA orientation? Do they know too that gayness is learned?) They even have a name for it but that name escapes me right now.. And this just may be my own limited experience; but I know about five lesbians around my age that all have openly and repeatedly hit on young girls from as early an age as 12 on up to 18. (Probably the age they themselves were approached by an older promiscuous and predatory lesbian) And so on.. This is how it works in the herd too. The older ones teaching the young by behavioral example.

    Sexuality is a very dicey human/animal behavior that is not fully understood as to the delicate balance of imprinting, hormones and the like. I think until we have a definite grasp on it as to its origins, I don't think we should normalize that which may or may not be normal, before we fully understand it. And we don't yet. That we all can agree on.

    Maybe this post should be an episode for Southpark? It would probably be banned in Russia too.. lol...I don't know. I'll probably get chewed out for being honest in any event..

    *braces for it*
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    Anyway....

    There are a few reasons that Prop 8 has taken hold I think. First, California has always been one of the best places to be treated like a full human being if you were gay. In San Francisco in particular, there was always more support for a gay man or woman than in, say, Arkansas. The fact that even Californians don't want to treat gay people equally under the law was a bit of a shock. (I say that as someone who's lived almost their entire life in the South and understands the complexities of the culture there. Joe Windish for instance has talked about the support he's received in Georgia.)

    Second, and related to the first, Prop 8 was soooo close to giving popular approval to same sex marriage. When you are one play away from the touchdown, you get a lot more excited about the next season. In 1999, the Tennessee Titans essentially lost the Super Bowl in 1999 by one yard. The refrain the entire next season was "one more yard" and the whole state was ready to go. In 2005 when the Titans sucked, not so much excitement.

    Finally, because there are so many gay men and women who are out in Cali, it just affects more people. I have a web friend who's marriage to her wife is now at risk. More people means more excitement.

    All that isn't to say that people shouldn't be fighting the propositions in other states. I'm just offering some reasons why Prop 8 has been seen as special.
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    God I'm probably going to get crucified for asking this. And it reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where George asked Susan a similar question...

    How do you know which one is the "wife" of two women? Are they both wives? And if so, who fills the "husband" role? The word "wife" meant the one who bore children and kept the home fires burning. The word "husband" meant the one who saw to the needs of "wife" and children. Hence the word "husbandry". Do we completely redefine these english terms?

    I guess I'm old fashioned. *sigh*..
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    Gay marriage SHOULD be banned. The hell with the gay rights activists.
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    Pacatrue, nice analogy. I was in Tennessee in 1999 and excited about our new team, and remember the disappointment well. I guess I'm trying to view this more in the context of what seems like a larger movement, and I have seen a lot of misdirected energy lately.
 
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