8/13/2003 Dear right-wing nutbars, An open letter to the religious right
Haddayr Copley-Woods
I know you've been really busy lately, but if possible, please explain the following:
This summer, you are spending loads of energy and time helping Bush fund his ill-advised, unproven and condescending Healthy Marriage Initiative. You think that in the midst of horrifying cuts in the social services sector, it's a great idea to spend $300 million trying to talk people into getting married. Although you don't believe it's Uncle Sam's job to feed us, ensure our employment, or provide us with health care, apparently it is his job to improve our love lives.
Simultaneously, you are attempting to pass a "Federal Marriage Amendment" to the U.S. Constitution, defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
Perhaps this inherent contradiction isn't obvious to you. After all, this is the same lunatic fringe that has produced Tom Minnery, vice president of public policy for the right-wing group Focus on the Family, who in a recent press release blamed increasing acceptability of homosexuals in our culture for—among other things—"unwanted pregnancies." Sharp as a marble.
So, I will spell it out for you: if more marriage is good—so good that we need to spend desperately scarce federal dollars touting it—then it's good for gays, too.
Kelly Shackelford, chief counsel of the right-wing Liberty Legal Institute and a shining example of the best the right has to offer, disagrees with me. "You can read the Constitution as many times as you'd like," he spluttered after the Supreme Court made its recent decision striking down antisodomy laws, "and you won't find a constitutional right to engage in homosexual sodomy." Well, you've got me there, Shackelford. Not much gets by you. But I've read it a few times myself, and I've never found a constitutional right to engage in heterosexual, missionary-style, within-the-bonds-of-holy-matrimony-sex, either. So, before you light the candle and ask your wife to get out the naughty nightie, check to be sure that our boys in blue are not surrounding your house.
Okay. So maybe you can't use the Constitution to rationalize this contradiction. How about the Bible? Well, here's the thing. You have to do more than thump the Bible. You have to actually open it. And read it. And understand it, in historical context. And if you still can't seem to grasp that Jesus wanted us to love and not judge one another, try to comprehend this: the United States of America is a secular state.
Yes, most of us are Christians. But the founders of our country very specifically wanted us to be a secular state. They gave us the freedom to choose Christianity (any brand—because believe it or not, Christians of other denominations are Christians, too). You claim that acceptance of gays is tearing apart our institutions, but by trying to legislate your religious views, you are the ones dismantling what our founders built.
I understand that sometimes reading is hard and gives you a headache, but if you're going to prattle on about the "very principles our country was built on" as Pete Winn of Focus on the Family did in a recent interview, then you need to take notes in history class. Our country was founded on the principle of democracy, not heterosexual marriage.
I've shared some information with you. Now will you enlighten me? What is so scary about gays? What is so threatening, so terrifying, so monstrous, that it would cause Pat Robertson to pray for the deaths of Supreme Court justices? (Don't kid yourselves. He wasn't reminding an apparently absentminded God of their health problems so that He would convince them to retire.)
I live in Powderhorn Park. I am up to my eyeballs in flannel shirts and Birkenstocks. Lesbians are everywhere, flaunting their lifestyle: walking their dogs, playing with their children in the park, mowing their lawns in broad daylight.
But guess what? I'm still married. I still love my husband. I even still like apple pie. How does equal opportunity for them hurt my family? How does it hurt you? Why does the fact that a few gay couples in Vermont live in legally "civil" bliss have anything to do with your marriage at all?
It doesn't.
If you really want to save The American Family, why don't you quit persecuting gays and making moms on welfare sit through boring seminars instead of spending time with their children and instead go home to play Scrabble with your kids? It'll be fun, and you may even expand your vocabulary.
Haddayr Copley-Woods is a writer and graphic designer who lives and works in Minneapolis's Powderhorn Park.
