Give Me Just One Reason

P.S. Quit laughing at Heather's “melt down.” The woman is a warrior. Can't you recognize a head fake?

If you have ever been a victim of discrimination, then you can empathize with the notion that laws passed to legalize discrimination will only make matters worse. One such law is the Defense of Marriage Act, which Bush is trying to usher in via other means through enacting a constitutional amendment “defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and woman.” These types of laws must not be belittled as homophobic fearful reactions, but countered for what they are: heterosexist assaults on the human and civil rights of ordinary and extraordinary people.

Much like the way racism is based on a power hierarchy, heterosexism is a core repression of individual rights. For instance, not long ago in the South, segregation was legitimized in sets of laws that divided Blacks from whites. Whites benefited from this system because they didn't challenge it. It was not until the Civil Rights movement successfully delegitimized institutional racism that consent among whites shifted, as more people became accountable and thus began to resist the perpetration of acts of injustice.

It seems that we have learned little from the lessons of history, for the first time in the United States, an oppressed group is not only to be further marginalized, but regulated in binding constitutional law. This is reminiscent of a not too distant past in Nazi Germany when in 1935, paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code, made heterosexism law and anything outside of that illegal. Where did consent end and accountability begin for those not directly effected by these edicts of discrimination?

In New Mexico we have a crypto-republican governor who believes that “marriage is between a man and a woman,” and who consequently opposes gay marriage, yet insists that “anti-discrimination law [in New Mexico] provides adequate legal protection to gays and lesbians”. This exemplifies the consent of “democratically elected” officials reinforcing a dangerous trend spearheaded by their supposed opponents. By having the pot call the kettle black, the underlying hypocritical assumption is that the GLBT community is somehow less than when it comes to equal rights. Attacking something so basic as marriage for the non-heterosexual community compels one to construe that protection of property rights lies at the heart of this issue.

To change this, heterosexuals and nonheterosexuals alike need to question their own role in consenting to a system that marginalizes their friends, family, colleagues and coworkers. Instead of blending with the system, the inequities that heterosexism fosters need to be called out and named for what they are. It is only then that the issue of gay marriage will rightly gain momentum as a Civil Rights issue. Not until marriage is the entitlement of all will marriage between a man and a woman be anything but a heterosexist act and therefore an act of injustice. And by the same count not until marriage is the entitlement of all, will marriage between people of the same sex be anything but resistance to a system of inequality.

I'm highly concerned with the numerous articles published recently about gay marriages. How can our current world society allow such aberrational behavior? It would appear that we are living in a blind and sick society, and we don't even know it!

The Old Testament clearly states that “a man shall not lie with another man, as well as a woman shall not lie with another woman, for it is an abomination to God (Leviticus 18:22). I'm certain that some will say that we no longer live under the Mosaic Law, but rather under the grace of Jesus Christ. However, what most people fail to understand is that the grace of Jesus Christ did not come to do away with the law but to expand on it; thus, more is required of us.

Chapter one of the book of Romans in the New Testament states, in part, that the gentiles became vain in their imaginations and foolish in their hearts. They professed to be wise, yet they became fools. They changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator. For this cause God gave them up unto their vile affections. The women changed the natural use of their bodies into that that is against nature, and, likewise also the men leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for other men.

If this isn't enough, our own medical and scientific communities have come up with the concept that homosexualism is the result of a chemical imbalance in the body. In The Brain—Mystery of Matter and Mind, by Jack Fincher, along with numerous consultants in the fields of molecular biophysics, biochemistry, humanities, neurology, neurosurgery, psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and pharmacology, it discusses the results of various studies that support the chemical imbalance concept. Researchers found that male and female brains are chemically and structurally different. These researchers now suspect that human sexual behavior is the outcome of sex hormones acting on the brain during a critical period before birth. In their studies, they found that sex hormones injected into fetal or newborn laboratory animals made them adopt behaviors typical of the opposite sex—a female rat given the male sex hormone testosterone shortly after birth did not ovulate or show female mating behavior; and an adult male rat deprived of male hormones by castration and injected with the female sex hormone estrogen assumed the female mating posture.

The bottom line is that homosexuality is not normal behavior and should be treated as such! People that suffer from mental disabilities—dementia, schizophrenia, psychosis and other mental disorders, which are also due to chemical imbalances—exhibit abnormal and irrational behavior. However, with the proper medications, the chemical imbalances in these people are reversed and returned to appropriate levels that enable them to live productive normal lives. This same principle should be applied to persons suffering from homosexuality.

The acquiescence by our medical, religious, judicial and political professions to this group of sick persons clearly reflects their abdication of their responsibilities to society—to cry out against such aberrational, unnatural and/or abnormal behavior. For my part, if the wording in the Constitution or other legal documents is not explicit enough to define that a normal marriage constitutes the joining of two people of the opposite sex—a man to a woman, than it should be changed so that there is no misunderstanding or misinterpretation.

Same-sex marriage has been a hot topic of conversation for the past several months. But, instead of just talking about same-sex marriage, I would like to express my point of view on all marriages. In our society, it seems that the only thing that couples can think about when they are in a long-term relationship is when the man is going to pop the question. This puts enormous pressure on the man and many times the marriage ends up happening much earlier than it should. I don't think the situation will be any different for gay couples when it becomes legal for them to marry. In my opinion we should only allow marriages for couples who have been together at least 18 months for both straight and gay couples.

How dare the president attempt to write political bigotry into the United States Constitution? Either we are all equal, or the cornerstones Albuquerque of this great country, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, are both irrelevant.

Correction: Letters, “Daniels Fund Still Works”, March 4-10. Author Peter Droege, V.P. for Communications, The Daniels Fund, resides in Denver, Colo. Also, Ted Hobbs is House Minority Leader, not “Majority” leader, as was reported last week.