Again, guys?
Earlier this year, Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced that because he had learned his son was gay, he wasn't on board with discriminating against gay people anymore. Needless to say this didn't sit well with many of his fellow conservatives, and now it's led to an Ohio anti-abortion group changing their very mission statement to include "
and we're against gay people, too."
"If his daughter was to come home and say she had just had an abortion, would there be the same change on that?" asked Molly Smith, executive director of Cleveland Right to Life, in a Cleveland Plain-Dealer analysis last month of the potential repercussions of Portman’s change of heart. "We're hoping to work with him, but we cannot possibly work with him if he does not change his view on this."
A few weeks later, Smith and her organization made the point louder, changing its very mission statement to include gay marriage as anathema. It’s just like abortion, euthanasia and infanticide, the statement reads, because it’s “contrary to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” […]
Exactly how opposing gay marriage helps children grow up in a more stable environment, the mission statement doesn’t spell out.
Then again, if you simply presume the obvious—that the group's position is one based entirely of religious disapprobation, as the actual statement says—it doesn't particularly need to spell out anything at all. Same-sex marriage is bad because our preacher said that Jesus said that God said it's bad, and also purple monkey telephone, and also we can eat shellfish now because in Corinthians the word "clambake" appears on one page if you read it backwards and squint a little. And this is why Rob Portman's son isn't allowed to be happy in America, because people like this think Rob Portman being happy oppresses them and offends the magic sky ponies. Other people's religions say Rob Portman's son has every right to be happy, and still other people's religions and non-religions think that anytime your public argument boils down to "God said so," with no deeper reason than that, you've lost the argument and none of us have to listen to you anymore. That nasty group in Afghanistan blew up one of their nation's oldest and most precious archeological sites because they said God got pissed off by people carving on rocks.
Your religious pronouncements need to do better.
So fine, now we've got the Cleveland Right to Life and Anti-Gay Clearinghouse. I'm sure that'll work out for them, because now they can fire off the fundraising letters about both things. Maybe Rob Portman will learn a bit from this too, a bit about how his party treats people like his son when they dare want the same things everybody else wants.