by The aftermath of Proposition 8’s passage in California has put the spotlight on the glaring incivility of homosexual activists in the state. Understandably disappointed, they’ve gone too far by staging high-profile personal attacks on individuals who sided against their cause.
It seems that everyone in America mistakenly believes that they are entitled to have their every whim emblazoned into law. What ever happened to the idea of bringing society’s questions to a vote and accepting the result afterward? It’s certainly gone out of vogue, if it was ever in, and we’re the worse for it.
The irony of California’s unrest is that proximate cause of the current high was the state supreme court’s controversial decision to legalize gay marriage at the expense of an existing voter-approved ballot measure to the contrary. Had the activists on the court simply accepted voters’ wishes the current situation would not have come to pass.
In that respect the court’s ruling is similar to the one that initiated years of forced integration in the nation’s public school system. Although busing was a largely failed effort that left cities half-empty and half-broke and helped create suburban sprawl without achieving significant social integration, desegregation at least dealt with a fundamental question of equality – the distribution of the tax-funded education system’s resources.
Gay marriage does not and cannot meet the same standard for two reasons. First, homosexuals in America are perfectly free to live the lifestyle they’ve chosen. It’s even hip in certain circles to be gay. Second, the issue as it’s framed is little more than an attempt to redefine the all-important institution of marriage so as to grant homosexuality a legitimacy it does not have on its merits.
If the discussion, if what’s going on in California can be termed such, were about rights of survivorship, inheritance, access to insurance benefits, or other such legal construct, I suspect that gays would have encountered much less resistance. Certainly I would not be writing this article, if that’s any indication of the country at-large.
Instead, and suddenly, gay activists are publicly demonizing blacks, straights, Mormons, and the elderly as bad people who deserve to be ambushed in person and in print for daring to exercise their constitutional right to vote their conscience. If that doesn’t epitomize the chilling of free speech I don’t know what does.
It’s one thing to disagree with a law, to work to have it overturned, and to march on City Hall. But it’s quite another to accost and attack the opposition simply because your position – no matter how closely held – is rejected.
Writing about the crude behavior Chicago students toward a lone, daring McCain supporter, Katie Allison Granju says:
…most people who express political disagreement via trashtalk somehow find a way to justify their own ugliness, blaming it on the opposition rather than owning their personal decision to resort to insults and nastiness as they try (and usually fail) to make their points.
Gays and lesbians are failing to make their point in California for exactly these reasons. Their cause lost in the court of public opinion and they now think they can shout down and bully their opponents into compliance using sheer shrillness. Not so.
