Hatred of gays should be reserved for Sundays
Douglas Burns
What does gay marriage really mean for the straight majority? Are gay recruiting squads sprouting up and turning people? Will America devolve into ancient Sparta, where male homosexuality was compulsory?
Hardly.
Younger Americans tend to get this, albeit with some confusion.
In an episode of the wildly popular HBO show “Entourage,” one of the twenty-something straight white guys, someone who dates interracially and is even represented professionally by an Asian homosexual, sums up the views of most honestly progressive men under 40:
“Bring your gay friends to the party. I just don’t want to see any touching or kissing.”
Taking the “Entourage” view, I’m proposing a compromise: gay marriages should remain legal in Iowa — as long as the couples aren’t allowed to kiss publicly at the end of the ceremony. In its 80 days of service to Iowans in 2010, our legislators should be to able summon up a fix for that.
I’m all for civil rights and even civil unions. But I just don’t want to see two guys kissing. There was enough of that in “The Crying Game” for a lifetime.
Of course, with all of this, I can just look the other way, or turn down any invitations to gay weddings, not that I’m expecting any.
Then again, you never know. As comedian Chris Rock famously said, “Everyone in America at least has a gay cousin. When you were playing ball, he was the one jumping rope.”
At the end of the day, gay marriage is a debate because Americans are forever obsessed with other people’s sex lives.
Each day we are flooded with news of celebrities’ sexual doings, and you can’t get from the first tee at the golf course to the fairway without hearing rumors of some sap’s infidelity or bedroom conquests. It’s as reviling as it is irrelevant, and this prurience is probably the most pathetic thing about the American state of mind.
The worst-reviewed movie in my lifetime, “Gigli,” starring those one-time star-crossed lovers Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, still pulled in millions at the box office because people thought they might get to see some nocturnal gymnastics with the atrocious acting.
We are a sex-saturated culture. Check your “spam” e-mails tonight, and read all the unwanted messages peddling perversion.
The real crisis with sex in America today is not with private acts of homosexuality but with public showcasing of heterosexuality by increasingly younger and younger girls.
Have you been to a high school, or even middle school, lately?
Many of the girls are dressed like they’re at a casting call for a rap video.
When teen fashions are seemingly inspired by the attire of Las Vegas street hookers, that’s a scandal, a national moral concern of some weight and substance for parents.
Many of the people who are outraged about homosexuals sharing closet space send their daughters to school dressed like call girls.
Once people hit adulthood, their sexual business is not really the concern of government (unless people are charging for services outside of a few counties in Nevada where prostitution is legal) or the neighbors (unless the Barry White CD is cranked up too loud).
If two 30-year-old men who are having sex together in a Des Moines apartment want a piece of paper that says they are married, how does that really change life for the rest of us?
Even if the nation goes the way of Iowa, you can still hate homosexuals. Nobody is stealing your right to do that. But such hatred should occur in churches, not in county courthouses.
A marriage license is really an economic pact tying people’s fortunes together. In that sense, a homosexual union is essentially a free-market choice about who has access to one’s money.
Sure businesses would legally have to recognize the status of married gays. But if a corporation provides health-care benefits to an employee’s wife who happens to be named Tim instead of Kim, what’s the difference, really?
Moral judgments on homosexuality are better left to the churches, which don’t have to perform gay marriages or even accept homosexual members.
Some churches denounce homosexuality as sinful. Southern Baptists have been very vocal in their opposition to gay marriage. Meanwhile, the Episcopalian Church confirmed an openly homosexual bishop. Fortunately, you can attend either church. And since opinions about homosexuality and marriage are at their core religious beliefs, or lack thereof, you should be able to marry someone of either sex.
It’s a matter of religious freedom. CV
Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman who writes for The Carroll Daily Times Herald and offers columns for Cityview.
