The Official You're My Boy, Blue! Voters Guide Part 3

While on our trip last week, we were startled by the number of "Yes On 8" signs throughout the Central California area - all through the "farm" areas on the way up to Mountain View. We even saw them as far South as Camarillo with a group of supporters waving banners on the corner - an event that I decided should be labeled "Bigotry In Motion."

Those signs have become quite the eyesore throughout Southern California as well as I see them every day on my way to work. But I do find their yellow color to be quite appropriate considering the amount of cowardice the proposition is draped in. Pure and simple cowardice.

This is the one that makes my blood boil - it really does. Ever since a month or two ago when I came home to find a flyer on our front door for it. The front filled with smiling, happy couples and families. The back with the kind of hate-filled bigotry that makes people hate organized religion with the fire of a thousand suns.

"Let's Restore and Protect Marriage once and for all."

Yeah? Maybe we should start by banning divorce then. That seems like a pretty good way to "protect" marriage, huh?

Of course, the Mormon church has bankrolled a large portion of this campaign, desperately trying to make it illegal for a man to marry a man. Perhaps they'd find it better if the man could marry many men instead.

On this blog in the past, I've talked about "emotional blackmail." And this is filled with that.

"Proposition 8 protects our children..."

Wow.

The amount of hubris in that statement alone is mind-boggling.

Everyone see the commercials where they showed the school children who were taken to see their teacher, a lesbian, get married on a field trip? This is the Yes On 8's dream come true - shoving everyone's face in the "fact" that the kids are going to be taught about gay marriage. They ignore the fact that the kids' parents would have had to sign permission slips to attend the trip. They ignore the fact that they can still talk to their kids about what marriage is and isn't to them according to their beliefs.

But it also means they have to teach them about the real world - not the fictional world they live in where everyone believes what they believe. They'll have to teach their kids that it's okay to be different and to believe differently than the next person. It's okay to have different opinions about different subjects.

And yes, it's okay to marry someone of the same sex if someone is inclined to do so.

Of course, this all comes back to religion. They can dance around it all they want by talking about "traditional values" and children and all the like but when it comes down to it, someone with the literary credentials no greater than Dr. Seuss wrote on a piece of paper hundreds of years ago that homosexuality is an "abomination" - and so it goes.

I'm all over the place on this one because it makes me so angry, I can't write rationally about it. But in the end, to me, it comes down to this...

The United States had laws on the books that made interracial marriage illegal until 1967. As someone who is a part of an interracial marriage, that concerns me.

Why, you ask? I mean, obviously things could never go backwards in such a way, could they?

There's a poem by Pastor Martin Nimemoller that often gets brought up in discussions about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust called "First they came..."

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

And I think that sums things up better than I could.