Even while recovering from pneumonia I’ve been reading and hopefully all my head-shaking isn’t slowing my recovery. I’ve gleaned for this column some of the crazier brain-clenching stuff found on Right Wing Watch.
I mean, “Thou shall find gay people yucky?” Yeah, I don’t remember that passage in the Bible, but Mission America’s Linda Harvey says the “yuck factor” is a gift from God, a “basic instinct.” When we think about gay sex we’re supposed to shudder and make sour faces and just be generally disgusted.
You need to find these sex acts, once you find out about them at way too early an age, you need to not find them repulsive. The yuck factor is being taken away from our kids and that is a huge preventive issue and a common sense issue on homosexuality where people know, wait I would never do that, yeah that’s a basic instinct that God has given you and it’s the right one.
What I want to know is, who thinks about gay sex except gay people? I don’t think about gay sex. I’m happily heterosexual. So what I want to know is, why is Linda Harvey thinking so much about gay sex? And why does she assume that, like her, the rest of us obsess over it?
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Do you think maybe there is something Linda Harvey isn’t telling us?
Of course, without that yuck factor, Harvey warns that, “What’s at stake is the future of civilization.” According to her, gay rights willl “overturn every vestige of civilization.” Why, it will be so bad that straight kids won’t be able to date anymore! “Everything, every cultural norm that children are being taught so we really need to stand up against this.”
We’ve seen antigay forces become hysterical of late, with Alan Keyes saying, like Harvey, that marriage equality will somehow harm straight people and that it is an attack on the hetero community’s “inalienable rights” to procreate and thus, marry. Keyes argues that so-called “elitists” are the enemy and that they mean to dissolve, “the moral, legal and institutional basis for just government, i.e., government aimed at securing the God-endowed unalienable rights of the people.”
By contrast the judges and justices deny and disparage authoritatively antecedent unalienable rights retained by the people (e.g., the heterosexual couple’s exclusive prerogative of procreation, which gives rise to the institution of marriage and its attendant rights.) They seek to establish an unconstitutional regime of constraint upon one of the powers of government constitutionally reserved to the states, respectively, or the people (i.e., the power to make laws “respecting an establishment of religion.”) The will to resist such abuses called the American people into existence as a nation. If today that will has failed, its failure will be the headstone that marks our nation’s demise. Be advised, this tragic conclusion is the purpose of the whole “gay marriage” maneuver.
Tony Perkins apparently agrees about the end of civilization because gay rights is some sort of government plot to control population levels and that therefore, people are somehow being encouraged to engage in same sex relations with the result that our civilization would “simply cease to exist.” Perkins talked the other day to Oklahoma Pastor David Blair who compared the fight against marriage equality to the fight against slavery and opposition to Nazi Germany.
And then we have the GOP State Board of Education candidate from Texas who says gay people are like murderers. Theresa Thombs posted on Facebook, “We are not bigoted or hateful. Jesus said to love the sinner but hate the sin. God gives you free will to do what you want. But murder is a sin, but even a murderer is loved and forgiven if he asked to be. We both have the right to believe the way we choose is all that I am saying.”
Of course, Jesus said no such thing. “Hate the sin but love the sinner” is in no way biblical, Old or New Testament. Thombs apparently is insisting that, like her, we fail completely to understand the Bible that is, in any case, not the law of the land.
Antigay forces are becoming increasingly shrill and hyperbolic, pulling out all stops to rage against nature. Not only can they not stop marriage equality by waving a Bible around – because the Bible has very little to say about all things gay, but they cannot use “natural law” as a weapon because gay animals abound in nature. If God made anything, he made gay and straight. Sure, gay people don’t reproduce, but failure to reproduce is not somehow “un-natural” and if it is, then war is also un-natural because war keeps people from reproducing just as surely as does homosexuality. So why aren’t these folks raging against war?
It’s only going to get worse, of course, as marriage equality becomes the norm across the country, and in time, it will. People just aren’t feeling that yuck factor like they used to. Harvey talks about people being taught to not feel it but I can say that as a child, I was taught to feel it and it was only as I grew up that I realized it was silly, to say the least.
Sure, Harvey has a right to think it’s yucky, but she doesn’t have the right to insist we feel it’s yucky; a basic premise of the First Amendment is that we all have the right to decide for ourselves and no right to force our beliefs on others. I suspect she is more fascinated with gay sex than she should be but that, too, is between her and her potential sexual partners, and to be honest – speaking of yuck factors – that is not something I wish to think about, especially before breakfast.
In the end, gay people getting married will not impinge on the rights of straight people to get married and if it leads to a few less children on an already over-crowded world, I can’t see a downside to that. Aberrochristians will still be free to hook up and hate and reproduce in the dystopian world to come. The beauty of it is, so will gays and lesbians. The fact that people like Harvey and Perkins will be pulling out their hair and stomping their feet is just an added bonus.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
