Monday, January 11, 2010

Video killed the Prop 8 arguments



Apparently we won't know if that's true.

I'm really confused about the rhetoric here.  For some background - California had gay marriage for about 30 seconds, during which the Apocalypse happened, dogs and cats lived together, fire and brimstone rained from the skies and children grew up without having repressive gender identities drilled into them from birth.



OOOORRRRRR, nothing like that happened and instead people who loved each other for years got the social and governmental support that we've currently enshrined in the institution of marriage.  Which, put that way, sounds a helluva lot less like the end of society as we know it.

However, it's hard out there for a bigot, and so NOMNOM made their fantastically parody-able commercial and frightened Californians with the idea that OMFG THE GAYS ARE GETTING MARRIED and the majority of voters voted against extending a basic civil right to a portion of the population for reasons that are completely murky to me, but I'm sure are really very well thought out.  Full of, like, facts and shit.  Of course the vote ALSO meant that there are now some REALLY complicated civil institutions in CA with regard to marriage, domestic partnerships, etc., but whatevs, at least we're still hating on the homos, amirite?

And in another however, people who don't get their jollies worrying about whether or not their neighbors are having OMFG GAY MARRIED SEX or worse FILING JOINT GAY TAX RETURNS filed suit that really Prop 8 is the sort of hateful legislation that civil rights laws were supposed to prevent and sooooooo, that just about brings us up today.

So there is going to be a trial.  Which I was really kind of excited about for a couple of reasons.  The first, and probably most honest, is the morbid fascination I have with modern American politics and the ways in which we manage to make really simple concepts really hard because we're, like, scared of difference and some shit.  The second, and equally macabre, was that I was REALLY interested in what the totally-secular-for-real arguments against gay marriage were going to be.  I mean, seriously, is there a single argument against marriage equality that isn't based on some sort of hateful interpretation of scripture?  I WANT TO KNOW HOW GAY MARRIAGE WILL RUIN SOCIETY!!!  I'm sure there are going to be charts and PowerPoint presentations and maybe some interpretive dance linking two women getting married with the decline of the honeybee population and the increase of people being intolerant fucking jackasses.  Maybe there would be a flowchart showing how all gay people who get married use wedding planners funded by Al Qaeda.  It's bound to be filled with facts and truth.

The trial was originally going to be televised, then it was going to be broadcast on YouTube (which would have been awesome for a whole other set of reasons) but the Prop 8 supporters were worried about people seeing their TOTALLY FULL OF FACTS AND NOT JUST HOMOPHOBIC SUCKITUDE FOR REAL testimony, (or something, I can't find a source that really distinctly spells out what, exactly, was the point of concern) and THEY appealed to the SCOTUS, which said "wow, your unspecified concerns regarding your top secret good arguments against marriage equality make a lot of sense to us (especially Scalia and Alito) sure, no broadcast."


It seems to be the case that the pro-homophobia side is worried about violence against them.  Because Matthew Shepherd was actually an acolyte of Fred Phelps, and Brandon Teena was just going undercover to show how awful transgendered people were and the "gay panic defense" is totally all about queers panicking around breeders.  Right?  How . . . difficult . . . it must be to be them.

I am really curious about this.  I understand that may of our trials are not broadcast (particularly not that CourtTV (home of the slow speed chase) is now TruTV (you know it's just "truth lite" based on how they spell "tru")), however I am suspicious of a move to less openness when the side arguing for secrecy is already the side weakest on facts and empathy (not to mention heavy on outright lies, but I'm too lazy to search through my 900 Facebook links to find the supporting docs for that one).  At any rate, I'm sure there will be print coverage which I will anxiously read, but it just won't be as hilarious as I imagined seeing someone try to answer a straight-forward question like "how will gay marriage harm opposite marriage?"  Ah well.  I can only but dream.


This is a little bit more ranty than I had intended, but hey, Hypatia's Girl is angry.

1 comment:

  1. http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Perry-order-opinion.pdf

    Perhaps you should read the opinion to find out!

    ReplyDelete