I hope this blog will become an intellectual ammunition depot, a treasury of inspiration, facts, arguments, and rebuttals — material you can share in conversations with friends, family, colleagues, and any random person who wants to talk about marriage equality.
I can’t claim to be an authority in the subject. But I’m okay with that. I’m an instructional designer by trade: someone who works with subject matter experts to figure out the best way to teach their content and build real-life skills. It’s a great gig. I get to learn new things all the time, and my own area of expertise lies in transferring that knowledge to others.
Luckily, I love to do research, find things out, and analyze what other people are saying. So here’s where I need your help. Tell me what’s been holding you back when you try to share the truth about marriage equality. What opposition arguments do you encounter again and again? What leaves you sputtering in outrage and unable to reply? What are the allegations you know aren’t true but don’t have the facts to refute? What issues leave us vulnerable when we’re on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX?
Add your suggestions as comments to this post. If something comes up repeatedly, I’ll do some research, try to craft a response, and put it out there for you to critique, improve, and share.
Help me out, people. We’ve got some elections coming up.
There are a lot of people engaging in this kind of discourse I know of as well, including me. Is there a way to combine all of it in some sort of unified voice of reason? I see ideological assertions on both sides that are not helpful to doing solid debunking and rational engagement of the issues and facts. I do see people doing this though (like Sullivan).
I know a single woman who voted for prop-8 (the “anti-gay-marriage” baloney), and her argument was something like this:
She’s single. She’s likely to remain single, and is well on her way towards becoming a spinister. She has a number of good friends, all married, with whom she’d like to provide with some of the “rights of marriage” — deathbed access, property transfer, etc. (Sorry, I didn’t try to get her to enumerate the list, and I don’t completely recall it now, alas.)
She argued that the whole “civil union” and the “separate but equal” was going to break the rights away from the institution of marriage, meaning that her needs would end up being addressed almost as a side-effect of the process, and that with marriage becoming an option for same-sex couples, the community would simply abandon the broader goal.
Basically, she argued that the “I got mine” mentality would win the day, and that she wouldn’t see ‘marriage rights’ decoupled from marriage and available to her in her lifetime. The gay community would, upon having achieved “the right of” marriage, completely forget about everyone else who might benefit from the alternate approach.
I didn’t know if this should be classified as the “crab in a pot” argument (crabs don’t let other crabs escape from the pot, they pull ‘em back in if they start to escape, or so I’m told) or as “realpolitik”. It was the only argument based on *actual* self-interest, as opposed to selfishness, that I heard in the months leading up to the election.
One I’ve heard many many times, is that it’s a sin, BUT being divorced, and re-married, (which is considered adultery, according to the same Bible) is an acceptable sin. Right now, in Iowa, our biggest opponet is a Divorced Legislator named Merlin Bartz, Republican Hypocrite ( merlin.bartz@legis.state.ia.us ). He is even telling all County Recorders to refuse to give Marriage Lisences to Gay Couples.
I’ve emailed him several times and asked him why he hated Gays, his response was…”The thing that most concerns me with the gay community is the NON acknowledgement that it is sin.”
I would be willing to bet that the majority of hetero divorced people also refuse to acknowledge that they are committing adultery.
Mr bartz is also a big supporter of the Iowa Family (Police) Policy Center. http://www.ifpc.org An Iowa group that is against Gay Marriage, AND DIVORCE. How Ironic and Hypocritical is that???
The other thing that people object to is that it goes against nature.
This is a bit off-topic, but I think it’s still relevant, concerning H.R. 1913, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, coming up for a vote soon…
Right-wingnuts claim that sexual orientation being included in the bill could be interpreted to mean that pedophilia is a protected status.
Now, I want to say: “You think it’s okay to kill a person who may not have actually raped a child?”
But then that’s not really getting at the core of the issue…
I guess some kind of clarification would be in order — homosexuality is not illegal, but pedophilia is… but then how would that relate to the actual bill?
I wrote about the details of H.R. 1913 in an email to that nutty Glenn Beck, if you need some background info: http://femlock.wordpress.com/2009/04/25/an-open-letter-to-glenn-beck/
Also, if you couldn’t tell by the relentless comments, consider me a regular reader.
The argument I hear most often is that marriage is for creating a family, and gay parents are bad for children.
Do we have any statistics that show how children with gay parents, single parents, and straight parents compare in areas such as education, crime, suicide, etc.?
Sigh. Yes, we have numbers and statistics and children of gay parents do just fine, thanks.
And many of us have kids. It’s not like we’re going to go marry straight people if we can’t marry our partners, it’s that our partners and our kids will be unprotected.
To the blogger: Your vids are great, and a fabulous source of info. We need to deal with the fact that religious freedom is not affected by our marriages and indeed many of us are people of faith whose religious freedom to marry is DENIED by the H8 folks.
(We got married in Oct and are waiting to see if we are still married)
I blog at Friends of Jake, on gay marriage issues and their intersection with faith issues.
In the same vein as Rona and IT’s thoughts, something that would be useful in dealing with false allegations would be comprehensive lists, divided up by topic, of all the scientific research done into issues relevant to the LGBT community, including a paragraph for each of the more significant papers outlining their findings and which other papers confirm them. One example would be a list of research papers dealing with how well same-sex couples function as parents.
This would be useful for two reasons: firstly it would provide a one-stop shop list of all previous research on a given topic, which would be useful for major LGBT orgs, researchers, students and anyone else who might want to check out the existing research. Secondly, it would enable ordinary LGBTs to be able to refer to specific research papers when rebutting arguments rather than using the vague, easily-attacked “there are lots of studies which prove/disprove that…” line of reasoning. Being able to refer to specific studies would be a very powerful tool in a discussion.
One more thing. My wife and I are one of the 18,000 couples, so I have set up a new blog Gay Married Californian where we can tell our stories as well as have a centralized place for resources. Needless to say, I will be posting links and videos from the talented blogger of Waking up Now!
I’ve encountered the following argument from my conservative relatives in Bakersfield California: “why should we allow gays to have extra rights? They can already marry a person of the opposite sex, why should we allow them a right we don’t have: namely, to marry the same sex?”
To which I replied: “When we attain the right to marry the same sex, so will you…”
Thought I would share something my roommate and I put together:
Did you know… ?
Did you know the most qualified applicant can be rejected for a job in 30 states solely because he’s gay, and the employer won’t get in trouble because it’s not illegal?
Did you know a young woman can be kicked out of her apartment in 38 states just because she’s gay, and the landlord isn’t breaking any law?
Did you know a straight couple that’s been together for 20 years could qualify for 1,138 more federal benefits than a gay couple that’s been together for 20 years, because only the straight couple is allowed to get married?
Did you know a service woman fluent in Arabic who works on translating enemy plans can be discharged from the U.S. Army for saying that she’s a bisexual?
Did you know if a straight man picks a foreign bride out of a catalog and marries her, his bride is eligible for American citizenship, but if a gay man travels to Canada, falls in love and marries a man, back in America his husband is eligible for deportation?
Did you know 5 homosexuals were killed in the U.S. in 2007 by people who hated them merely because they were gay?
Did you know if more people knew the facts, we might be able to end inequality? Please pass it on…