Letter to RedEye: Gay Marriage

Well, another letter in to the RedEye. This one, I'm kind of hoping DOESN'T get published, because my friends read it - and most of them are gay. So if you hadn't guessed, this is a "gay marriage" thing. Which, frankly, means that my opinion doesn't really matter at all. I'm not gay. I'm not even married. I can't even manage to land a girlfriend - so I really have no say in what's right or wrong about gay marriage in the first place.

So of course, when the Boy on Boystown guy opens the floor to gay marriage debate - I jump at the chance to make a fool of myself. It's the problem with being a realist. "Should" just isn't a huge part of the process - because what matters most to me is what "is" and what "will" be rather than what "should" be. SHOULD gay marriage be accepted? Probably. WILL it? Probably not - at least not for a while yet. I'm in favor of it, really I am. But you know what scares me the most about gay marriage?

The inevitability of Gay Divorce Court on TV.

Anyway, here's the letter I sent:

Whenever I'm faced with the actual question of whether gay people should be allowed to get married, I have to quote Kinky Freidman by saying, "I support gay marriage because I believe they have the right to be just as miserable as the rest of us." In all seriousness, I do believe that homosexuals should be allowed to get married - same as the rest of us.

However, the real question isn't one of SHOULD it be allowed, but WILL it be allowed - and I have to say that I doubt it will be happening anytime soon, no matter how many "should"s you throw at it. The fact is that marriage is, as was pointed out, a government institution (despite its pseudo-religious history). Which means that government gets to decide, and it's been made evident in many ways that the government (which is made of elected officials who REPRESENT the country) is not ready to accept homosexuals at a level that allows for them to officially marry. Maybe once there are a decent number of elected homosexual representatives in the government (openly homosexual BEFORE election), gay people will be able to have a better chance of beneficial legislation.

My question back to you is why aren't homosexuals trying to make lemonade out of the lemons that they've been handed? If marriage is exclusive to opposite-sex couples, and civil unions are exclusive to same-sex couples, why is it that the fight is to ignore civil unions and rally for marriage instead of rallying to get benefits and government legislation attached to civil unions? If the only reason for wanting marriage instead of civil unions is the various governmental benefits in the marriage package, why not fight harder to get pieces of that benefit package added to civil unions (if not the whole thing in time)? Why not even go for DIFFERENT benefits or MORE benefits? I think that the civil union is only a weak/unacceptable version of marriage because few are fighting to make it any better. In many countries, civil unions have benefits similar to marriage (and a few have equal benefits) - so why does it seem like here in the USA there would still be a homosexual uprising if civil unions provided the EXACT SAME benefits as marriage but had a different name because of the difference in gender-combinations?

Rally the troops to buff up civil unions and leave marriage alone. Besides, if you follow the news you'd see that when it all comes down to it, gays already have the right to get married. They just aren't able to marry each other yet.

Aaron Samuels, 23, Bridgeport

I'm sure there'll be a flood of comments on how wrong I am or how wrong my logic is. It really doesn't matter to me - like I said, my opinion doesn't matter in the long run. I'm not gay, and I'm not getting married anytime soon.

But let's face the facts - how can gays expect to be given equal rights from the legislative branch when the truth is that the POSSIBILITY of a representative being gay coincides with being asked to step down and resign. You've seen it in the news - and while people are supposedly more against him for the criminal nature of his sexual transgression, the fact that it was of the homosexual persuasion is what's raising all of the eyebrows and shaking fists... If a senator has to protect his career by announcing (denial or not) that he is NOT GAY - what chance do gay people REALLY have at this point to be taken seriously or as full equals in every sense of the word?

No, that's not how it SHOULD be. It SHOULD be different. But this is what it IS and HAS BEEN. Maybe in the future, things WILL be different...







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Smoking Ban vs Gay Marriage

Before I even get off into my usual slur of bad analogies, half-baked jokes and other things that prevent me from forming a coherent verbal (but not written) sentence before 8am - I have no idea what I'm talking about. You hear that? My opinions on these subjects really don't matter because neither of them really affect me directly. Just like men and abortion rights, we can have an opinion, but we'll be seen as wrong just for having one since it's not our issue and it apparently never will be. Now that this is out of the way, I'll say my peace.

Hopefully at least SOME of you read my last piece, about the new Illinois smoking ban that still allows people to smoke, just nowhere where they'd LIKE to smoke. Like in places where there's shelter from the environment other than their own home. What was GOING to follow was a piece about the new cigarette taxes coming into legislation.

I can't begin to think of a better analog for "adding insult to injury."

Instead, certain reader responses in the RedEye this morning just got me BACK onto this original rant, and I felt I had to add more on because people STILL just don't get it: there should NOT be laws being created to ostracize people just based on the theory that secondhand smoke is really that dangerous. Again, I haven't seen any scientific proof. And even if there were test subjects in controlled environments who got cancer from extreme doses of secondhand smoke, I highly doubt that those experiments would reflect the REAL world, where secondhand smoke isn't that concentrated (even indoors) and the hundreds or thousands of other factors that determine when a person gets which cancer.

But no! The liberals (who, might I remind you, are taking away liberties rather than protecting them) are trying to argue that they can tell you where you can't smoke because they're afraid of dying from secondhand smoke. Fine. If you want to make the argument that a hypothetical scary result that hasn't been factually proven yet can be stopped by one of the things that might trigger it in limited circumstances (a long way of saying "you MIGHT get cancer from POSSIBLY secondhand smoke IF this all happened INDOORS and you ignore everyone OUTDOORS")...

...then I say that you have to also agree with the arguments to ban gay marriage.

That's right, I went there. I went there, took some photos, bought a T-shirt, came back, and showed you boring slideshows of it all. Smoking ban? Gay marriage ban. But why, Aaron? Why would you equate something as silly as not being able to smoke indoors with the lifelong struggle of the gay community to commit to each other for life in a federally-recognized ceremony?

Because it's the same argument being made against gay marriage that was made against smoking indoors: something that could potentially harm in a non-proven way if conditions were met. I'm taking about the "gay marriage destroys families" argument here.

I'm arguing that there's an equal percentage of people trying to prove that this seemingly-unlikely event is what triggered their horrible problem. Trying to pin secondhand smoke as the culprit for lung cancer in non-smokers is just as improbable as pinning gay marriage as the culprit for the lack of value of the sacrament of marriage itself.

After all, while being gay is NOT a choice that can be turned on or off, deciding to couple and deciding to want to get married is TOTALLY a choice. You can be gay and do whatever you want to other gay people for as long as you'd like - but when you make the choice to invade the institution of marriage, that apparently affects OTHER people in the bond of marriage and some see it as possibly destructive.

Likewise, while nicotine addiction is not as much of a choice (at serious levels of addiction), it is TOTALLY a choice to start smoking. And you can smoke whatever kinds of cigars and cigarettes you want for as long as you'd like - but when you make the choice to invade the air space of other people indoors, that apparently affects OTHER people in the room and some see it as possibly destructive to their health.

Can you agree on the similarities in the arguments?? One is just as ridiculous as the other! And yet the insane one about SMOKING is easily thrown together as actual legislation by the liberals, while the insane one about GAY MARRIAGE is a rallying point liberals AGAINST the same argument!

Sorry, liberals, but you can't have it both ways. One fauly argument becoming law should equate to more laws backed by the same argument - whether it's something you believe in or not. Smokers believe they have the right to smoke. You argue it threatens the health of others and besides, "smoking is bad for you anyway so maybe this'll help people to quit." Gays believe they have the right to get married. Others argue it threatens the sanctity of marriage and besides, "being gay is morally wrong anyway so maybe this'll help people to get right with God."

Are you starting to see how absurd it all is?

You don't have the right to quash someone's liberties because you're afraid people could get hurt and die. If that were the case all around for everything, people shouldn't be allowed to play sports because there's a high risk of steroid use, and people shouldn't be allowed to drive cars because they can't be trusted to not crash and kill people, and farmers shouldn't be allowed to grow peanuts anymore because so many people are allergic to them and they kill so many people.

You have the right to defend yourself from imminent danger.

You don't have the right to legislate a ban on anything that could potentially be dangerous.

Because people have the right to do dangerous things - to themselves especially, and potentially to others. You can drink alcohol. You can own a gun. You can drive a car. You can bungee jump and parasail and skydive. You can also smoke a cigarette.

And if people are going to take away that liberty for such a stupid reason, I'm just saying that the things THEY believe they have the liberty to do should be taken away just as easily.

And please don't try to turn this into me being a homophobe or against gay marriage. I have several gay friends and I'm not against gay marriage. If you read this piece properly, you'd see that I'm trying to NOT ban gay marriage by trying to get this smoking ban lifted due to the ridiculous reasoning that brought it into existance. It just usually gets a hot-button topic to get people to actually notice the NOT-hot-button topics.

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