Friday, December 26, 2008

Proposition 8 to be Voided?

by Al Falafel

Newsflash: California Attorney General Jerry Brown has asked the state Supreme Court to void the gay marriage ban approved by the passage of Proposition 8 on November 4th.

Even before that infamous ballot measure, the public profile of the entire LGBT community has been forcibly solidified around the issue of same-sex marriage rights.

Of course, this fabricated perception is a function of the mainstream media's "manufactured consent" (ala Noam Chomsky) decrying our more diverse common interests as U.S. citizens. Our undeniable reality is set against the inbred primal revulsion churning in the stomachs of narrow-minded masses of Americans who still buy into the "culture war" deception. Provoking such tensions is a profitable enterprise for the standard-setting Fox News organization.

The "culture war" is actually a ratings war and there are still big gains to be earned exploiting even the slightest discomfort most Nielson Families feel toward us "deviants and perverts."

Never mind that ours is a reality of which the straight majority has no capacity and even less desire to understand. Forget empathy. Mindlessly they conform to the demands of an inherited legacy, five thousand years in the making. The myths and mores they cling to once defined a primeval social order at the birth of civilization, imposed to stifle the inborn drives and inclinations of our forebears, with well-known exceptions. Through countless generations a significant minority of humans yearned as we do today for the fulfillment of an authentic existence that seems to have always been totally alien to the conformist majority. The justification for discouraging committed same sex relationships lost all rational credibility generations ago.

Perpetuating such an outmoded world view in a civilization fifty centuries advanced imbues the current majority with a sense of superior entitlement over how we live our lives today. That entitlement is as illegitimate as it is inherent in any surviving authoritarian regime rooted in ancient history and tyrannical arrogance.

This is a viewpoint we never hear articulated outright. But it is exactly what should be asserted in any way it can be said, loud and clear every time a marriage ban apologist mouths the tired and specious claim that "five thousand years of history has defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman."

In this would-be age of enlightenment, the fact that this outmoded tool of oppression has shamefully persisted through five millennia is a much better argument for legalizing gay marriage than against it. By rectifying the age-old denigration of a people for the kind of relationships they form, even at this late date, the high ideas of justice and equality may finally approach realization.

Five thousand years of institutionalized homophobia is enough. It has only inspired fear and persecution of homosexuals, inciting not just a denial of our basic human rights but a pogrom through the ages: continual derision, denigration, violence, murder and mass extermination -- as in last century's during the Holocaust and in modern day radical Islamic cultures.

Our survival has not come easy. But it has come by way of the time-tested strength of our collective character, not to mention our heightened sense of humor.

With the emergence, cohesion and maturing of our distinct global culture over the last half century, we as a community have earned the still evolving respect of our forward-thinking and courageous fellow travelers on this human adventure. And many of us work tirelessly in natural alliance with them to bring peace, justice and hope to the world.

How can we still allow ourselves to be held to social and legal standards set by those backwardly oppressive forces hell bent on doing little more than enforcing their own arrogant ill-gotten and irrelevant sense of superiority and entitlement?

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