Monday, November 24, 2008

Richard Rodriguez: Right About Gay Marriage and Prop. 8 in CA

My friend Richard Rodriguez was recently interviewed on/in salon.com re: gay marriage and the win of Prop. 8.

What he brings into the picture is the dissolution of the American family that caused such a strong reaction in CA in promoting Prop. 8. After all, having tied Prop. 8 to to "American family values," especially to children, Prop. 8 seemed like a bill to protect children...and who doesn't want to protect children?
But the real challenge to the family right now is male irresponsibility and misbehavior toward women. If the Hispanic Catholic and evangelical churches really wanted to protect the family, they should address the issue of wife beating in Hispanic families and the misbehaviors of the father against the mother. But no, they go after gay marriage. It doesn't take any brilliance to notice that this is hypocrisy of such magnitude that you blame the gay couple living next door for the fact that you've just beaten your wife.

The pro-8 campaign calls itself the Protect Family Movement, even though the issue of family was the very reason gays needed to have marriage. There are partners in gay unions now who have children, and those children need to be protected. If my partner and I had children, either through a previous marriage or because we adopted them, I would need to be able to take them to the emergency room. I would need to be able to protect them with the parental rights that marriage would give me. It was for the benefit of the family that marriage was extended to homosexuals.



But religion plays an incredibly important role in this debate:

"Religions have the capacity for being noble and ennobling but they are also the expression of some of the darkest impulses in us -- to go after the "other." For Christians, if the other isn't the Muslim, it's the homosexual. That is the most discouraging part."

Click here for more.

Pace!

B

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