Unhappy about prop 8

It's the day after election day. Are we allowed to talk about stuff that isn't election yet? No? Well, okay...

I'll drop the act--obviously I'm writing of my own free will, and therefore must enjoy doing so.

Obama wins in landslide. I assure you that I am excited about this, even if I'm not much interested in conveying my excitement.

What I do wish to convey is my displeasure about prop 8, the gay marriage ban. It passed. Why, California, oh why must you be so regressive?

As I understand it, there are basically three arguments against gay marriage. There's the religious conservative argument, the secular conservative argument, and the libertarian argument.

The religious conservative argument gets the most contempt, and is most deserved of contempt. Religious arguments can only justify that which you already believed. So it's not a justification at all, but rather, a sign of underlying prejudice. This "justification" deserves no place in politics.

The libertarian argument is that marriage should not be recognized by the government at all. That would be great, or maybe not, but either way it's beside the point. Right now, marriage is recognized by the government, so we might as well be fair about it. Once we get privatization of marriage on the ballot, maybe then we'll talk about it.

The secular conservative argument goes that marriage serves a specific purpose (ie raising children), and gay marriage lacks something vital to that purpose. Put a different way, marriage is a privilege, not a right. I'm fairly sure that gay couples can adopt and raise children at least as well as single parents can. Moreover, if a straight couple chooses not to have children (or is incapable due to fertility issues), we wouldn't want to ban their marriage. The difficulty of implementing a ban on infertile marriages is beside the point--we wouldn't ban it no matter how easy it would be to do so. And the "privilege" vs "right" thing is also beside the point. Either way, it's unfair to grant this privilege/right to some people and not to others. It's racist by word substitution.

I think the secular arguments against gay marriage are BS. Nobody would find these compelling unless they had an interest in finding them compelling. Basically, I think the supporters of prop 8 are a bunch of authoritarians. Authoritarians only believe these subpar arguments because they're on the side of the "proper" authorities, because they're supported by the Republican party. I wouldn't normally do this kind of armchair psychology, but I'm doing it now 'cause I'm so unhappy about the prop 8 results.

On a lighter note...

I really liked yesterday's Dinosaur Comic.



Oh, I think we're all a little racist by word substitution.