Let me start by saying that I shouldn't be surprised... I'm not really. I am however very upset that I am now one SB 1070 piece of legislation away from having to move just to be with who I love. This is especially troubling since now I know that there are plenty of bigots around me that probably want that policy to be put in place. I will keep fighting for what it right. They will never break my will.
The arguments that Dan Savage made are completely right, but I want to expand on them a bit. These are people who believe that the book they read from is infallible. They feel it is untouched by the evil that men do or any dishonesty on the part of its authors. They believe that it says that homosexuality is a sin that is banished by the new testament. They miss that it doesn't even mention it. They think that Jesus crusaded against the gays, but he never spoke a word against us. Even if they want to twist some of the other words, they are acting as though this is the one area that the old testament has to be binding. Yet when it comes to the things that people like them do, it is unthinkable for them to stone someone (primitive hate is only justified against "those people" or "them"). It is bizarre, but completely based in hatred of those who are different from them.
One of the big ironies that I find is that some of these people are the young earth creationists. These are people who believe that dinosaur bones were planted here by either god or the devil as a ploy to test their faith in the word of their almighty. With this being true, could it not also be plausible that there are parts of their book that were put there to be tests of peoples' overall understanding of the message of God? Could that message not be that gays should be killed, but rather that we should love one another and take care of the least among us? Isn't it a foolish precedent to say that god put things on this earth to test us, but didn't feel the need to test people within that book.
I will say that I am an agnostic, but I can't see a god that created people to judge and hate other people for being themselves, especially when that behavior is outside of the lives of those who don't want to participate. There is no one forcing a church to marry a same-sex couple. With a government that is supposed to promise separation of church and state, isn't it supposed to be known that laws were not to be centered around religious or any other fragment of society, but inclusive of all? Yet it is liberalism that is attacked by these people as the evil that men do.
Within the other side of this argument we have people who are against marginalized demographics such as women. They say that women are evil. Women are supposedly sluts. Women are supposedly beneath voting. Women are supposedly not fit to decide how they deal with their own bodies. This is the right's justification for taking rights away from women and making decisions in legislature that override the will of a woman with her own body.
It is supposedly the view of the religious right that money is for those who already have money to start with, and the poor are meant to get out of their way so that they don't bring people down. They attempt to write a story of sloth onto the poor to justify their own penchant for greed. They argue that liberals are ruining this nation by ensuring that the poor are fed and the have-nots have before we start looking to throw money back into the pockets of the rich. Their main points from the bible in this area are not that we should care for the poor, but rather that practices that require sacrifice to assist the poor such as taxes are unjust and somehow against god.
These are the people who will fight for every single unborn life as though it is precious, but as soon as it is born want to cut its ability to get an education. These are the people who spend their days attempting to refute what has been proven by science as a means of justifying their agenda. These are the people who are the first ones to engage in a war against a people wholesale and push ideas and concepts like "kill or convert", but then project that their purpose is to avoid Sharia Law within their own land. There is no Sharia Law or any party in this nation that wants to enshrine it as policy here. There is plenty of effort to put down the religion that started it and lump all of the people who worship under that banner as evil, but there is no Sharia Law within the United States. There is US rule in countries within the Middle East, and there are supposedly good people who pretend this is some holy war and that this drawn out occupation is justified by their Christian agenda. There are people who say that 90% of Muslims should be killed that are actually applauded within this nation, Michael Savage. The people that applaud them are the same ones that claim moral high ground to me based on who I love. These people don't blame the years we spent occupying foreign lands for the debt that we have amassed, but rather blame it on the poor who have been struggling to survive within this great nation. Even under fiscal conservatism, their budgets don't make sense because there is more justification for them to increase the money going to defense contractors for technology to kill people and money to cut taxes for the rich than there is willingness to help all people have the education they need to succeed and necessities they need to survive. This is once again not the teaching of any god that I would put my faith into. Jesus never preached for these things.
These are the people who voted against the rights of people to love and marry who they love and want to marry. These are the people who will defend to the death their right to let people die because of the failures of our ridiculous healthcare system that feels the insurance companies are the ones who should be protected. These are the people who call themselves the true believers. They are the ones who are trying to condemn us as losing our freedoms when the only freedom that we are trying to take from them is the freedom to oppress those they don't like. It isn't shocking that these same arguments that are used against us are the same ones that were used against women voting, the end to segregation, the end to slavery, etc. These are the supposed "moral" people within this country. These people justify language of killing Latinos based on them being here and crossing an invisible line to try to escape lives that we wouldn't be able to accept. They rewrite the history of this nation to make our ancestors any different. Our ancestors came here to avoid lives that they hated. We didn't come on work visas. These people are the ones who give the rich the power to privatize the prison industry and then make laws making so many trivial things crimes to make it profitable. They would rather put a republican in office to admittedly do nothing (keeping government small), but readily call it socialism when someone tries to make things better.
I love this nation, and I don't think we are the problem for wanting it to be a place where everyone can succeed and exist. If I am going to hell, it is for truly loving humanity and wanting this country to live up to its promises to us all. The problems are those who are too busy voicing their hate to remember that the real message of any God worth listening to is LOVE.