I Love New Jersey... Perhaps.

New Jersey is either about to become either a sensible state or join the ridiculous list. Today the decision will be made as to whether or not gay people can get married there. I saw a picture of protesters outside the courthouse this morning. One had a big banner that read "God Hates Fags" and a t-shirt advertising a website of the same name. WTBF? (What The Bloody Fuck?) How do these people live with themselves??

They say that they "are not offended... but God is." How seriously, utterly flawed. This argument has more holes than a tunnel in Boston. First and foremost, If there is a God, s/he/it did not create the words "faggot" and "dyke." Those are slurs, created by people who are uncomfortable by the fact that two people might love each other, same sex organs and all. Those words do not appear in the Bible (text search tools are amazing, hm?), which is the only book that the almighty (yet surprisingly non-prolific) lord hath supposedly published. People who use those kinds of words are ignorant and scared... and scary in their ignorance.

All the "family organizations" tout the "sanctity of marriage." Now there's a joke. What's the divorce rate now? According to the NY Times, 42% as of last year. You'd think that for such a venerable institution, it would have to work more than 58% of the time, especially if God is supervising. Fifty-eight percent is a failing grade in most places. When people (famous or not, but I must admit to thinking about the Britney incident in Vegas) get married in a drunken stupor or for shits & giggles and then call it off two days later, where's the sanctity? Or, when people marry for money and for all sorts of reasons except love, then WTF? And - if you believe that God was beaming down on said marriages - then was s/he/it in a drunken stupor as well? Does God drink? Considering the state of affairs in the world today, I can't see how God couldn't drink. In my opinion, if s/he/it exists, the Judeo-Christian God (who kinda looks like John Coltrane for some reason) is kickin' it with Mohammed and Shiva while Buddha is making a Baja Fresh run because he lost a bet that the Mets would win in '06. And the tacos are pretty fucking tasty in Heaven.

Um... that was a tangent. Back to the diatribe.

One of the Republican stalwarts, bill o'reilly, blustered that "The next step will be people marrying animals." That sounds like a bad SNL skit (with Horatio Sanz as the pig). Where does that idea come from? How does one go from same-sex attraction to inter-species attraction? Do homophobes really believe that because a man is attracted to another man, he will therefore be attracted to a horse? He might be hung like a horse, but that doesn't mean that he wants to be with the horse itself. Maybe I'm not that bright, but I simply don't understand the connection!

Another angle: the Bible says lots of things (and i'm not getting into my views on who wrote the Bible and how much was ignored or drunkenly thrown away in the process). But can you pick and choose from the Bible? For example, it also contains plenty of mentions about women's nonexistent rights, the importance of slavery, and (my favorite) killing other people because they don't believe in the Judeo-Christian God. All of those things are, well, unjust and have mostly been eradicated from the US. Only took 150 years from the founding of this country to give women the right to vote, and the civil rights movement wasn't actually that long ago in the scheme of things. Punishments in the Bible are pretty darn harsh, but they're thankfully considered cruel and unusual today and are not practiced. So why keep one of the prejudices? It's basically insisting that all of the lessons in the Bible should be taken with huge grains of salt and that God was just playin' around... except for a few words about homosexuals. Those apparently warrant messengers of God's supposed hatred in the form of cruel people with bad t-shirts.

Finally: even if they're right and their God is offended, their argument does not hold water. Perhaps they don't understand the concept of "separation of church and state." Get your holy hand out of the presidential closet. Yes, "In God We Trust" and we pledge allegiance to one nation under God, but these are expressions based on the idea that we are all allowed to choose our religion freely (or to not have any at all) and still keep that separate from the political arena. The last time I checked we don't have a national religion. Now, religious events that harm people (ritual cannibalism, mass suicide, etc) are outlawed, and rightfully so, but a marriage does not harm anyone. People who say "yes, but now that gay couple will be discriminated against, and their children will be discriminated against in school" are the most likely to be the ones who do the discrimination and teach their kids that gay people are evil. I bet there's a few who molest little kids and then go home to their jobs as webmaster of websites like godhatesfags dot org.

So, on the brink of either my contempt for or my admiration of the state of New Jersey, I still don't understand why this is an issue. There are so many things in society that need immediate attention - the wars and genocide all over the world (bullets don't care about sexual orientation), the environment (global warming is fucking everyone, that bisexual slut), and the appalling state of education in this country (trust me) - and the fact that countless hours are being spent on this debate is absolutely inane. Let people love, and value the love between two people. Grant them the same rights and the same language; they're lucky enough to have found each other. We're pulling for you, New Jersey. Make us proud.