Sorry we missed you.

I returned home the other day, from various SAR related activities, to find a flier from the yes on 8 campaign, with a handwritten note that read, "Sorry we missed you."

You know what? I'm pretty sorry I missed them too. I'm sorry I missed the opportunity to tell them to their faces that I think they are bigoted assholes, and that I stand in firm opposition to the hate that they're peddling.

According to them "61 percent of California voters said 'Yes' to marriage as a man and a woman." Well apparently I'm in the minority 39 percent; those that really don't care how other people love, figure that it's their own damn business, and that they should have the same basic rights as every other Californian. Including the right to marry whoever they damn well please.

How exactly does it hurt your marriage if two dudes, or two girls, decide they want to be married as well?

Protect families? Maybe some families have two mommies, or two daddies. How about protecting them? And just how does their existence threaten your family?

Oh, because under Proposition 8, it "just wouldn't be called marriage, and public school teachers wouldn't have to tell children it is the same as marriage."?

So basically the whole opposition to gay marriage hinges on spurious concern for "the children" -- somehow it's always about "the children"" -- and the purported fact that public school teachers wouldn't be required to parrot the bigotry that you're teaching your own children? That maybe if, horror of horrors, your child turned out to be gay, they wouldn't have to contradict the message they've received, from you, their whole lives, that they are an abomination?

I can't help but think that the Yes on 8 folks are the same type of people who, 50 years ago, would have been vigorously opposed to having their children in the same school as black kids, or, heaven forbid, having their daughters or sons date a black man or woman. Didn't the segregationists use religion as an argument in favor of anti-miscegenation laws? Even a cursory reading of the flier reveals language that sounds a whole lot like the "separate but equal" tripe trotted out 40 or 50 years ago, by those who were busy enshrining their hate into law.

So why don't we just call the "yes on 8" campaign what it really is: out and out (no pun intended) bigotry -- hate under the guise of piety. Funny how often the two are conflated, isn't it?

This campaign, in addition to the obvious Jim Crow throwback, also sounds eerily like another recently popular, ridiculous, policy plank of self-righteous zealots everywhere, once again out of concern for "the children"; that being the teaching of creationism as science. Nevermind about 150 years of peer-reviewed science, confirmed time and time again by factual observation and experimentation, the theory conflicts with our favorite fairy-tale, that has no basis in demonstrable reality, so we don't want it being taught in the classroom. Science, or in this case equal rights, be damned.

I can think of a few other countries that base their laws on two-thousand-year-old fairy tales, as opposed to the ideals of democracy and equality for all. I'm sure the Prop 8 people would love it if we simply stoned to death those who's concepts of morality don't match up their own warped mythology-based morals; just like they do in those other countries. Lets hope the CA voters are a little more enlightened.

Sadly, I'm not holding my breath.