The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

I’m sharing this because as a religious person, I feel that I can be helpful in ending DADT, by clearly differentiating between my BELIEFS, and GOVERNMENT ACTION:

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Dear Senator Schumer:

Isn’t it time we stopped ejecting men and women from the military just because they are gay? Don’t our honorable service men and women deserve to have durable relief from discrimination?

I’m a religious person who does not believe that homosexual acts are appropriate or moral. That said, I also do not believe my personal faith is a guideline for military code of conduct. Homosexuality is not a crime, and we need to stop treating it as such.

I would like to recommend a Strengthen our Military Act of 2009 that:

Stipulates: REPEAL of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell as policy

Provides: for equal protection under the law of homosexual couples

Requires: the same moral strictures of fraternization, promiscuity, etc, for ALL couples, straight or gay, and

Makes exception: For deployment into sensitive areas of actively gay COUPLES…. for instance, in Islamic countries where that may pose a danger to the couple and their unit to be practicing homosexuality openly, such couples may be redeployed.

This seems like a common sense approach, and I would urge you, Senator, to introduce legislation to the Senate that accomplishes this. President Obama has repeatedly stated his willingness to overturn DADT, but doing so requires an act of congress. Please act.

Sincerely,
ME

This week, I was confronted with a flyer from the American Family Association, urging the boycott of Pepsico, for becoming a “major backer of homosexual agenda with $1,000,000 in gifts to gay groups”. Well…

I am a Baha’i. I was born Christian. I can definitely sympathize with the religious alarm at the legalization of “gay marriage” as I’ve struggled with this issue myself. That said – do I honestly believe I have a right to tell religions that don’t agree with me that they can’t sanction gay marriage? No. No I do not. Moreover, the flyer was so obviously alarmist and misleading that it offended me. One section says this:

“Pepsi forces all employees to attend sexual orientation and gender identity diversity training where they are taught to accept homosexuality.”

Wow. You know what? That’s just about a corporate requirement – to prevent lawsuits. Are we seriously singling out Pepsi for this? I rejected the flyer on that sentence alone – not to mention my resistance to the term “homosexual agenda.”

I’ve defined my own views on homosexuality and gay marriage here: http://www.windonwater.net/index.php?topic=205.msg913#msg913. But I want to state here for the record – the Iowa Decision felt, to me, like a vindication of my rejection of groups like the American Family Association, and their tactics. A common sense, well reasoned addressing of the issues yielded one of two possible just outcomes. My preference would have been to ban the use of the term marriage by civil institutions altogether, and extend civil unions to all… but the other possible outcome was to define “marriage” in the civil sense as a civil contract, and to extend it to all, as such.

The official summary of the Iowa Decision is at the link above…

QT

http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/11/even_more_prop_8.php

One guess at what group feels they were robbed of “meaningful gender identities,” and thus likely long for them with a much greater intensity than the rest of the populace. It’s quite likely that the same impulse that would attract men by the hundreds of thousands of men to the Million Man March–the sense that something had been lost–is the same impulse them that would lead them to reject an expansion, and to their mind, a redefinition of marriage.

A very good point. Another: the feeling that black people’s marriages are persistently under attack. A clinging to traditional marriage as a cure for some of the ills that affect black people is a characteristic of black America that is under-appreciated.

This is from Richard Ford’s article that Ta-Nehisi is quoting:

After all, traditional marriage isn’t just analogous to sex discrimination—it is sex discrimination: Only men may marry women, and only women may marry men. Same-sex marriage would transform an institution that currently defines two distinctive sex roles—husband and wife—by replacing those different halves with one sex-neutral role—spouse. Sure, we could call two married men “husbands” and two married women “wives,” but the specific role for each sex that now defines marriage would be lost. Widespread opposition to same-sex marriage might reflect a desire to hang on to these distinctive sex roles rather than vicious anti-gay bigotry. By wistfully invoking the analogy to racism, same-sex marriage proponents risk misreading a large (and potentially movable) group of voters who care about sex difference more than about sexual orientation.

After all, many opponents of same-sex marriage don’t oppose gay rights across the board. In California, same-sex couples enjoy significant civil rights protections and legal status as domestic partners, and voters have shown no interest in changing that. National polls show that overwhelming majorities support employment-based gay rights, including equal access to careers in the military, and same-sex civil unions. It’s only when it comes to marriage—the word, with its religious as well as civic connotations—that pro-gay sentiment dwindles: Recent polls show that only 30 percent to 36 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. It’s this finding, of course, that the results of last week’s elections echo.

The sharp differences in the polling numbers, depending on whether the question is marriage as opposed to almost any other gay rights issue, suggest that opposition to same-sex marriage isn’t simply the 21st century’s form of racism. After all, whites who opposed racial miscegenation in the Jim Crow South didn’t support other civil rights for blacks or civil unions for mixed-race couples. In fact anti-miscegenation laws worked hand-in-glove with laws prohibiting sex outside of marriage and intimate cohabitation of unmarried adults to effectively outlaw interracial intimacy altogether. When Mildred Loving, who was black, and Richard Loving, who was white, successfully challenged Virginia’s law barring interracial marriage, they were not just fighting for social acceptance and hospital visitation rights. They were fighting a jail sentence, suspended on the condition that they leave the Virginia and never return together: effective banishment from the state. Anti-miscegenation laws were designed to prevent intimate racial mixing of any kind; by contrast, many of the people who voted to ban same-sex marriage are apparently supportive of same-sex intimacy—provided you don’t call it marriage.

Coates is not overwhelmingly persuaded, but I quoted more than he did because I think there’s a “there” there.

QT