Same sex marriage in Minnesota vote scheduled for today

The conservative argument seems to come down to "God doesn't like the gay".

What they really mean is conservatives don't like "the gay", so they claim to know what God thinks, better than anyone else knows it.  It makes them feel better in a changing world where they don't do well with change.

The religious right claims to believe some strange things, including for example that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, that the earth is only 6,000 years old, that evolution isn't real, and that God made everything and everyone just the way they are.........except 'the gays'. They think, wrongly, that you can 'catch the Gay', you can be converted to 'the Gay', or have the Gay 'repaired' through so called reparative pray-away-the-gay therapy --- none of which is valid. At least praying away 'the Gay' is better than electrocuting it away by wiring up gay peoples' genitalia for sexual torture/ aka 'aversion' therapy.

The problem with conservatives, a problem which is most extreme in this case the more conservative and the more religious far right one gets, is that facts are not their friends, and their ideology is disconnected from objective reality. Their ideology does not work in practice; it is a failure.

Here is the problem; conservatives claim that their families are better than anyone else's family, and therefore everyone should do things their way. They would like us all to be forced to do so, as much as possible.  You know - freedom, but only freedom to be like them.

Except..........there is no FACTUAL, objective evidence to support that claim. Quite the opposite is true.

Conservatives have claimed that gay marriage is all about 'adult desires' transforming an institution into one that is no longer child centered. Really?  Because there is substantial evidence that in conservative states which are supposedly highly religious there is greater use of porn, greater infidelity, higher rates of divorce, and - the big one here - greater FAMILY INSTABILITY compared to liberal states.

And it turns out that if you believe God created all the animals and humans, then GOD wants a certain percentage to be that way, because all the evidence points to people being born with their sexual orientation largely innate, AND to animals being born that way.  Not only that, but it appears that humans and other species with same-sex couples (and occasionally three partners in some bird species) have been doing a great job rearing their respective young, and establishing long term monogamous pair bonds - you know, the kind of FAMILY groups that thrive and endure.

You have to be skeptical of those religious conservatives who, for example, like the pastor of a Minnesota Baptist congregation who neglected to mention that fact in his testimony to the legislature on behalf of same-sex marriage opposition who neglected to mention that fact in identifying himself. There has been a lot of speculation about that regarding donations and other issues, but I think the real reason he didn't want to mention that little fact, that lie-by-omission, was that it would undermine his claims about familial superiority and how much more GODLY it was to do things his way.

Because the Southern Baptist Church has a huge problem, as a patriarchal ultra-conservative organization, with protecting pedophiles, child abusers, fathers guilty of incest, using the reason that because God is the head of the religion, and male pastors are head of the individual congregations, and all men should be dominant over women and children as the head of their families, therefore to accuse a man of doing something wrong - like incest, pedophilia, wife and child beating is wrong - even if the men, including the pastors do those things.  They claim it is better for women and children, and even men who are not heads of households, to suffer that abuse, than to challenge patriarchal male authority, by doing things like reporting crimes to the police.  Any women or children who do so are punished, but not men.  Men are protected no matter what crimes they commit.  They are to be forgiven, not reported, and the abuse is allowed to continue -- because they preach that is what God wants. This belief, called dominionism, where men rule, is the same one that Michele Bachmann has repeatedly and very publicly espoused.

I don't think many legislators would accept that as a better family model, one that is 'child centered' rather than 'adult desire' centered. That is not in any way, shape, or form better for children, or about children, except as prey for predators.  It is not about safe, stable, wholesome families.

There is NO valid argument against denying couples the right to marry because of same-sex orientation. There is NO superiority to heterosexual couples, and only, statistically, a relatively small benefit to two-parent families over single parent families.  Families are families, all kinds; no gets to define their ideal family as the only legitimate family.  And parents are not statistics.  Some parents, including heterosexual parents, are good at parenting, and some are horrible.  Sexual orientation does not guarantee good parenting; it doesn't even make it more likely.

The issue of racial equality and civil rights has been compared to gender and sexual orientation equality and civil rights.  On the right that comparison has been made that people are equal, and that no distinction of gender, ethnicity, OR sexual orientation should be part of our legal recognition of intimate partnerships. It should come as no surprise to learn that the language that would deny same-sex couples legal recognition of their marriages came from Michele Bachmann, who notoriously - and inaccurately - made the claim for familiar superiority of slavery, including signing a pledge while running for President that said:

“Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”

Because hey - that two parent heterosexual element is everything, right? Um NO. Wrong again, as noted here:

The pledge cites an invalid source – the 1880 census doesn’t have great data on slave family structures, it turns out — but the standard estimate for the number of slave families broken up by the sale of children away from one or both parents is about one in three. With life expectancy so much lower in the 19th century than it is today, I’d guess that about half of all slave families in the antebellum US were ones in which children were living with both of their parents.

What this leaves out, of course, is how many of those children we now know through the real science of DNA testing were not the biological children of their nominal slave 'fathers'.  But there is more factually wrong with the notions of race and family, and parenting specifically in the assumptions of conservatives, that parallel their wrong assumptions about 'the Gay', as noted in the same source:

But again, let’s pause for a second. Contrary to stereotypes, most African American fathers who don’t live with their kids are involved with them on a regular basis. Almost half see their kids or speak to them by phone at least once a week, and fully two-thirds spend face-to-face time with them at least once a month. (This percentage, by the way, is significantly higher than the analogous stat for white fathers who don’t live with their kids: 67% vs 59%.)
So when you compare slave families to black families today and wring your hands about the decline in the two-parent household, you’re not just ignoring the fact that slave children lived in “households” where their white master, not their own parents, had final authority over them. You’re not just ignoring the fact that many of them saw their parents savagely beaten and their mothers repeatedly raped. You’re not just ignoring the fact that their parents were in many cases prohibited by law from reading them a bedtime story. You’re not just ignoring all that.
You’re also saying that a family destroyed by the sale of its children is functionally identical to one in which the kids sleep at their mom’s most nights but have a bedroom in their father’s place, cereal in his cupboard, and drawings taped to his walls.
You’re saying, not to put too fine a point on it, that my ex-wife and I, by amicably separating and choosing to raise our children together while living apart, behaved comparably to the slaveowner who tore a toddler screaming from her mother’s arms and sold her away forever, permanently severing the bond between parent and child.

We cannot write our laws around conservative failed notions of family life that only acknowledges the legality of traditional marriage. We live in the real world, one where there are some wonderful traditional families, and some who are not so wonderful, but where those are not the ONLY valid families.  All families, all marriages with or without children, deserve legal recognition. Just like we do give full and equal legal recognition to people of all races, in spite of conservative bias and revisionist history and biology.

We must do so because it is the right thing to do, and the hell with conservative objections.  What do they know? Clearly, not much.We don't want or need their 'do as I say, not as I do' fact-averse homophobia dictating our public policy and laws regarding marriage - or anything else.