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Whether their thoughtlessness is based in bigotry or ignorance doesn't matter. The point is, nowhere on the petitions does it ask the petitioner if he understands the document he is signing or the serious ramifications of his actions.
Nothing in those four paragraphs is worthy of a newsflash, of course. This is the way that the petition process works in our democracy. Sort of amazing, isn't it?
What's new, however, is the current motivation behind the process: Petitioners are asking their states to write discrimination into their constitutions. In Massachusetts, the petitions do not even provide for civil unions. Moreover, anti-gay factions are recruiting signers not with the civil arguments due what's clearly a civil rights matter, but with moral ones based in large part in religious beliefs.
No party, state or religion can claim moral superiority over another without subjecting itself to an examination of its own morality. So, while the petitions are very public documents that reflect the shared opinion of many, the actions of petitioners are very personal. And the published lists of names confirm that in a stunning way.
As I scrolled the long list of Florida petitioners, clicking page after page after page (14,297 at last count), the names took on lives. Behind every Joe Smith and Jane Brown, whether he or she be in Broward or Sarasota, is a face and a home, and perhaps a job and family. Behind every name is a past, present, and dreams for a future.
After about five minutes of reading and imagining, I literally stopped breathing. You see, it's one thing to read the number and words “ 450,000 signers of The Florida Marriage Protection Amendment ” in a press release, but it's another to actually read the individual names.
The list is a dazzling visual aid, demonstrating that real people with real lives, lives that are as diverse as they can be, are judging other real people with real and diverse lives on, of all things, rightness. And I have no doubt that in some cases the judgments are declared without the benefit of conversations or even introductions.
Without evidence or assessment, but with a stroke of a pen, Joe and Jane have written their gay and lesbians neighbors off as unworthy of the rights they possess and, more to the distressing point, the rights their cheating husbands, alcoholic wives, toothless meth-addicted sons or daughters, pedophile brothers, fornicating priests and crooked politicians enjoy.
And it isn't right. I might be a lesbian living in California, but I know damn well that even on my worst day I fall on a scale of morality somewhere between a sweet, bingo-playing grandma and a crack whore. I feel for my southern brothers and sisters. Being judged on morality by anyone sucks, but being judged on morality by Floridians just takes the cake!
C'mon, don't get mad. You know it's true.
Obviously no one in any state can claim to have cornered the market on morality, so the arguments of petitioners are ridiculously flawed from the outset, lacking reason at best, and glaringly hypocritical at worst:
Pro-amendment folks believe gay marriage will harm society, as if gays and lesbians haven't been having commitment ceremonies for years; they insist that the traditional family will suffer, as if their families haven't suffered by their own behaviors since the beginning of time; they say people will want to engage in polygamy, as if that would be a new phenomenon; and some even tell us, with a straight face, that gay marriage will propel people to marry their dogs, as if we're not supposed to laugh at the preposterousness of that argument.
And naturally they profess that homosexuality is a sin, as if we were hatched in error and not children of God, as if the Bible contained one message, as if God didn't give each us a brain to reason with and the freedom of conscience, as if they know what God thinks.
So not only do I agree with the folks associated with KnowThyNeighbor.org, who insist there is no accountability demanded from a petitioner, I also think that some petitioners believe that their religious convictions make them immune to demands for accountability.
These folks have voiced their opinions in a most powerful way and should have absolutely no problem with having their names made public if they have any integrity at all. But is that a good enough reason to give KnowThyNeighboy.org a gold star for posting petitioners' names and addresses online?
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