Thursday, July 31, 2014

Quotes of the Day: False Excuses for Anti-Gay Marriage Laws


The prissy, self-congratulatory "godly folk" here in Virginia and elsewhere strut around making idiotic justifications for their anti-gay animus and opposition to same sex marriage.  They blather about marriage being for procreation - even though they are fine with the infertile and elderly marrying - and that children "need a mom and dad."  These and other alleged justifications for anti-gay bigotry purposely ignore the real motivation: these people suffer from sexual repression and suffer from neurosis and need a target to release their pent up internal conflict and associated aggression.  This is perhaps particularly true among the Roman Catholic clergy.  In the book "The Origins and Roles of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies," Jame Neill describes the phenomenon this way:
"Seeing others with the loathed desire and acting on them . . . "places the repression from one's own consciousness in jeopardy, and thus evokes the punitive reaction . .  fueled by the energy of the repressed impulse. . . .  fear and loathing of homosexuality developed in the Middle Ages as a psychological defense mechanism against inner conflict created by the imposition of clerical celibacy and the rigid repression of all sexual expression.  The irrational and at times hysterical tone in which homosexuality was discussed in the Middle Ages can thus be understood as a manifestation of reaction formation and projection originating in organizationally induced psychological conflict. . . "
Stated another way, the homophobes are screwed up mentally/emotionally - indeed, mentally ill in some ways - and seek a target for their own sexual repression. Rather than admit their own problems, the anti-gay crusaders concoct increasingly strained rational for their irrational behavior and loathing of others (it's no coincidence that homophobia remains strongest among the Southern Baptisit and Catholic clergy who remain obsessed with stamping out sexuality in all forms). In a piece in Slate, the growing ridiculousness of these arguments is addressed by Mark Joseph Stern.  Here are excerpts: 
As Yale Law Professor William N. Eskridge brilliantly argued two years ago, there’s really only one internally logical argument against gay rights: the idea that gay people deserve the state’s moral opprobrium. Yet this reasoning was functionally voided by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Romer v. Evans way back in 1996, when Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that no law motivated primarily by animus against gays could pass constitutional muster. The animus test has its flaws, but it has largely succeeded in keeping baldly moralistic arguments—gay people are gross, or sinful, or sick—out of the courtroom.
Marriage-equality opponents, however, never quite got over the shock of seeing their most treasured argument foreclosed upon. If the state couldn’t justify anti-gay policies by insisting that it’s rational to dislike gays, what other argument could possibly suffice? The question became even more pressing after 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down anti-gay sodomy laws on the theory that the 14th Amendment’s promise of “liberty” guaranteed gays a significant degree of personal autonomy. Once again, gay rights opponents were vexed: The court had just nullified their most populist argument—the notion that same-sex sex is a transgression against the laws of nature. What coherent justifications for anti-gay policies could possibly exist in a post-Lawrence landscape? 

The answer, it turns out, is that there are none—none, at least, that aren’t driven by animus. A review of the failed attempts here is instructive. At various points, conservatives argued that every child deserves a mom and a dad; that gay people simply make inferior parents; that marriage isn’t marriage without penile-vaginal penetration; that legalizing gay marriage would lower birth rates and, best of all, that somehow, allowing gay people to get married would cause more straight people to have children out of wedlock. Are you snickering? So were the judges who had the pleasure of hearing these arguments spelled out in court. 

In developing them [anti-gay marriage arguments], anti-gay activists began with a conclusion—gay people don’t deserve the rights that we straight people have—then worked backward, camouflaging each prejudiced premise with a supposedly neutral talking point. Under any kind of scrutiny, these theories instantly fall apart, revealing their bigoted, constitutionally impermissible core.

And yet the inanity continues full-throttle, because gay marriage opponents have backed themselves into the corner they’ve always dreaded. They can’t give up their quest now—but they’re barred from citing the explanations that they truly believe, deep down, to be correct. The result is the current tailspin of idiocy, a shifting argument with rootless standards roaming from rationale to rationale in a desperate attempt to find shelter from the storm of progress swirling around it. It’s a pathetic display, but not an unpleasant one to witness. Stripped of all logic and reason, the argument against gay marriage has been reduced to gibberish.

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