Moral High Ground

Disguising Bigotry Behind Morality

If you have been listening to the hype being churned out by the right wing extremists these days about gay rights and same sex marriage, then you know that the reason they believe we must be denied the right to marriage is because we would somehow diminish the concept of marriage itself.
Apparently they believe that allowing two people who love one another, and want the ability to protect their partners in the future both physically and financially, will make the vows of a heterosexual couple somehow mean less. They base their arguments on moral grounds, point at us and call us sinners, as if that were all the explanation that was required to deny us the same rights that they enjoy in their own families. But their arguments lose merit when you shed a little light on them.
What relationship diminishes marriage more: a same-sex couple in a committed and loving relationship who somehow manage to keep their union together without the ties of a legal or moral contract, or a legally married heterosexual couple who have stood in their communities church amongst their friends and family and made vows of commitment, and then broken them? According to these so called “conservatives” definitions of an acceptable candidate for marriage, the only absolute necessity appears to be that you be heterosexual. You can be a murderer, an adulterer, a child molester, a drug dealer, or a thief and still pass their litmus test for being morally adequate to stand in their church and receive blessings on your union to anyone you like, unless they are of the same sex.
They say they are not trying to deny us our civil rights out of hate or religious bias, and they may even believe that. However, until they no longer allow thieves, murderers, adulterers, liars, drug dealers, and divorcees the right to marry it simply will not be a believable argument.
If their opposition were based on anything other than their own personal dislike for our way of life, then these other lifestyles that would be considered even by them to be morally objectionable would be left out in the cold as well.
What makes this even more difficult, is that it is impossible to argue a point with someone who can’t even admit what the point is they are trying to make. How do you confront an issue and work for change when your opponent won’t even admit what they are really fighting you for?
They are making us expend time, money, and energy to prove that same-sex marriage won’t diminish “traditional” marriage, when that’s not the point at all. They know that. They know very well that the couple across from the street from them has no impact on their own marriage vows. If your neighbor cheats on his or her spouse, does that obligate you to do the same? It’s been going on for centuries, and somehow marriage has survived.
The reality is that they choose not accept us for personal reasons, and that is just plain discrimination. It’s not moral high ground.