Damn STRAIGHT I'm voting no on Prop. 8!

I'm rather thrilled by the amount of attention my awesome friend Prince is getting over on Bamboo Nation for his unswerving and extremely vocal opposition to Proposition 8, which is a bill essentially overturning the recent California Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage and banning it for good. I mean, seriously? Fuck that.

Lissen: I'm gonna come right out and say that I'm a Christian. (Surprised? You got a problem with that? No? Then let's move on.) However, my particular brand of Christianity (a nice Scottish Presbyterianism with a healthy dollop of Unitarianism and a smattering of old-school hippy-dippy philosophizing) doesn't find any problem at all with allowing gay people to get married. It has a hell of a lot more problem with hypocritical "family-rights" advocates who seem to think that letting two people who love each other and are committed to each other get married somehow undermines the very institution of marriage itself. For the love of Peter, Paul and Mary -- HOW? How does it do that? Two men or two women get married and somehow your own marriage is now less real? It seems to me the realness or unrealness of your marriage has more to do with the particulars of your relationship with your spouse than it does anybody else in the world -- in fact, I'd have to say it has literally nothing to do with anybody else in the world at all.

If anything, I'd say the wholloping divorce industry in this country (which I've contributed to on a number of occasions -- you're WELCOME, lawyers, I expect cards and letters) does more to undermine the marriage institution than anything else. I'd say the lack of importance people place on their marriage vows, and the general relationship malaise in this country (backed up by mass media signals) that lets relationships -- that are supposed to be permanent -- flounder and die on a regular basis with nothing more than a how-do-you-do does more to undermine the institution of marriage. I'd love to take a poll of, say, your local right-wing superchurch and find out how many affairs happen. I'll wager it's a percentage point just about equivalent with the rest of society (like 50%, shockingly). I'd also wager THAT does more to undermine your marriage than Sulu and his boyfriend getting married (which was the most awesome thing ever btw).

And I'd absolutely love to talk to you about the hottest gay relatonship in the history of ever, which just happens to be in the Bible. Yeah, I'm talking about David and Jonathan, and if you don't think that's a gay relationship then maybe your friendships are a lot more intense than mine. Maybe yours frequently involve things like this: "...and they kissed one another and wept with one another, until David exceeded. (1 Samuel 20:41)" In which case, my friend, I have news for you: you are gay.

Jesus himself (see: below, with TEEN) had not one word to say about being gay. Not one single word, my friends. He had a lot to say about loving your neighbors, and about judging not lest ye be judged, and about letting he who is without sin cast the first stone, but those little items frequently get tossed by the wayside around election time, don't they? And the worst phrase in the history of ever -- EVER -- is "hate the sin, love the sinner." I heard that so many times when I was growing up in the Evangelical Church (bleh!) as a way to justify their basic hatred of gay people -- "well, we don't hate them, we love them. We just hate their SIN. Therefore, we won't let them teach our children. Or have basic rights that everybody else has. Or be treated as equals. But seriously -- we love them." Hypocritical nonsense. It made me angry at AGE NINE. It makes me angry now.

So anyway -- VOTE NO ON PROP 8, my California brethren and sistren. And read Bamboo Nation if you're not already. That is all.