House of Reps marriage equality survey

[lizbee]

This one should be shared far and wide: the House of Representatives has a very short, very simple survey about marriage equality, ie, should we have it? Word is that it's so far been spammed by naysayers, so it would be cool if that could be turned around. The survey is here.

Comments

[recessional]

No, but some of them genuinely think YOU will. Some of them see this as a culture war wherein they are the downtrodden righteous and the other side are evil unholy bullies who will use the new state of the law as a club to profane their institutions and humiliate them and whose major concern is doing so.

They draw that in part from the fact that many equal-rights laws and practices do force people to do something they don't want to, or prevent them from doing something they do want to do: they require racist employers to hire, retain and treat employees not of their preferred race well* (theoretically), they deny homophobic employers the right to fire and harass their queer employees, they deny misogynist employers the right to sexually harass their female employees, etc, etc, etc. (Again: theoretically.)

A lot of fundamentalist Christians do not see the difference between the reasons someone doesn't "just quit" their job to avoid being made miserable by a bigoted colleague or boss, and the reasons someone might want to be married in their local congregation, even if the minister/denomination is dead set against same-sex marriage. What they see is that equal rights issues force some people to do things they don't want to or disallow them from doing things they DO want to, in the name of human rights.

And they're afraid.

And then I would say a substantially LARGER group of people know damn well how the situations are different and why, and dishonestly USE the fear and confusion/ignorance of the others and whip it up and intensify it, in order that this remain an issue, so that a person who more or less doesn't actually care about it even if they don't like "the gays" suddenly is in a froth because zie is afraid someone will come into ZIR space and FORCE this thing zie doesn't like on zir.


*slightly awkward phrasing due to the fact that depending where you are on the globe, the dividing line between races does not necessarily focus on white-vs-not-white.