Giving Marriage Back To The Church
By Frank Salvato
November 21, 2008
Across the country the issue of "gay marriage" is being debated, examined, voted on and legislated. Groups, both pro and con, have taken to the streets from Massachusetts and Connecticut to both ends of California to express their support and opposition to legislating finality to this issue. While the answer to this ideological impasse may indeed come from legislation, it may come in an unexpected form and require those on both sides of the issue to dial back on their own self-importance.
At the risk of leaving many a religious person's mouth agape, I don't have a problem with people who have declared themselves homosexual. Having spent many years of my young adulthood in the entertainment industry I came to know many good, honest, hardworking, patriotic people who had come to the conclusion that they were gay. While this is not a lifestyle I choose to embrace for myself, because I believe in the concepts of "liberty" and "the pursuit of happiness" I find it hard to pass judgment on someone's lifestyle when their actions do not affect my liberty or pursuit of happiness.
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others." -- Thomas Jefferson
My anti-homophobe and heterosexual declarations understood, I can't say that I would ever be moved to limit someone's ability to provide for another, especially where the issue of a life's devotion is concerned.
As my wife and I emerged from our polling place this past November 4th, we ran into one of our neighbors. I will call her Marilyn. Marilyn and Diane had lived as partners for the entire time we had known them and had, in fact, been in a monogamous relationship for a long time before that. On this day Marilyn informed us that she and Diane were splitting up and that she would be moving out of their house. Looking onto her face I saw heartbreak and sadness. Not a heartbreak and sadness reserved for someone belonging to a special interest group but the heartbreak and sadness of a person who was witnessing the end of a relationship with someone they once loved unconditionally. The pain was obvious and it was genuine.
At that moment I thought to myself, "Why? Why all the disagreement, all the vitriol, over allowing two people to officially declare that they want to spend the rest of their lives together?"
Then, as I watched the evening news recently, I witnessed a group of gay rights zealots invading a church service in rural Michigan. These activists disrupted a religious service by chanting pro-gay marriage slogans, throwing leaflets into the crowd, kissing in front of the congregation and otherwise displaying a grotesque and grand disregard for the parishioners First Amendment constitutional right to freedom of religion. This brought to mind recent events in San Francisco where similar "protests" were executed against the Catholic Church for their "stand" on gay marriage. My only conclusion to these events was that these fanatics don't represent the gay people that I know and that they were setting their own cause back years if not decades.
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