Opinion: Gay Marriage Is Inevitable, Get Used To It

By Eric Thomas

DETROIT (97.1 The Ticket) The road to progress is wrought with peril. It's an ankle deep slog through mud and sharp rocks, lined with skeletons of miscalculation. But above all else the road to progress is long, so long that when the destination is reached the person who set out on the journey doesn't look so brave after all. This of course, comes to mind after President Obama said on national television that he supports the right for homosexuals to get married.

Let there be no confusion: Gay marriage will be legal and commonplace. There is no way to stop it. There has never been a time where people can deny rights to other people.  It may work for a while but it will never work forever.

There are still plenty of people who want to deny the rights of gays to marry each other. I have absolutely no idea why. It seems odd that people would want to impose their values upon people whom they have never met nor will they ever meet. North Carolina just passed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Maybe that creates jobs somehow, I don't know.

The Kansas legislature has passed a bill saying that people can practice their "religious freedom" by firing people at their office that they suspect to be gay. I have never, EVER heard of a religion that actively says that its members need to fire gay people when they work for private businesses. In fact, the dominant religion in this country is Christianity, which specifically forbades its followers from judging others. The Kansas legislature is doing that, while laying off teachers and offering them buyouts. I don't know why I decided to connect those dots, but there it is.

Those who are against gay marriage need to understand something. You are a person who is denying rights to another person. One thread that binds all throughout history is this: Those who deny other people rights are always judged harshly in history.

If you can accept that fact then I guess there is no talking to you. If you stand in the way of gay people's right to get married you are going to have to justify that to your grandchildren someday. Your kids and grandkids do not see anything wrong with it. The way you feel about your racist grandmother is the same way your kids are going to think about you. When you make a statement about gay marriage, your kids are going to wave you off and say things like "you know how she is" which is a code. Its the polite phrases for ignorance. "they just don't know any better, that's how they were raised"

If you can swallow that as your legacy, well then march on. You have company. The ranks of the intolerant have many people surrounding them. The hallowed halls are filled with Bull Connor, George Wallace, James Buchanan and  Strom Thurmon. You want to hang in that crew, fine. I will hitch my wagon to Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr, and Ghandi. I still think that tolerance is a sign of strength and not a tresspass for the weak.

The interesting part of this is that the views are actively changing all around us. What seems to be happening is that people who are staunch opponents of gay marrige at some point befriend a gay person or someone in their family announces themselves as gay. I always thought that it was an odd ritual to put gay people through, forcing them to announce who they are like its anybody's business at all. But that ritual of "outing" themselves has produced results. The people who seek to discriminate can't do it on a personal level. As soon as a face is put on it, their views tend to dissolve. This has been the way it has gone for centuries. Its what Huck Finn is about.

Of course, I don't understand this debate at all. While I completely support the right for anyone to get married to whomever, I am curious why this is a discussion at all. Gay people want the right to marry so that they can have access to all the privleges the government grants to people who are married. Too bad that as we fight for the meatscraps we don't ask the far more simple question: Why is the government incentivising marriage in the first place? Why does the government feel like the country needs to be socially engineered into government sanctioned partnerships?

Isn't that a fair question? If your answer is that marriage leads to more stabilty, I might fall out of this chair laughing. People are not more stable just because they get married, to suggest so is a good indidcation that you are a fool. For those who think that the institution of marriage has some kind of a calming effect than I remind you of one word: Kardashian. I would mention the riot of failed marriages and messy divorces that has happened to almost everyone I know, but you don't know those people. I suspect that you know many of your own.

That particular bit of progress might be a little far off, tho. We haven't even passed the signs for that one on the highway. Right now the fight is over the right for gay people to marry and now the President is on the record in the "Yay" column, after saying his opinion was evolving for 6 years now. Progress is slow and it is bloody, but in the end it always ends up this way. I suppose the more pertinent question (one for people who think way above my pay grade) is this: Why do we fight these developments in the first place?