Are you allowed to establish a legally recognized family with the person of your choice? That is, do you get to marry whom you choose?
I can — because I choose someone of the opposite sex. But millions of Americans with a different choice are denied the right to marry the one they love. That’s wrong, prejudiced and undemocratic, in my view. California, at least, currently allows and recognizes gay marriage. However, California voters will vote in November on Proposition 8, which if passed would ban gay marriage. I hope they’ll vote against it, and so does presidential hopeful Barack Obama, and Senators Boxer and Feinstein.
I have a theory on the origins of prejudice against attraction to the same sex. For most of human history, survival was a serious struggle. Wild animals, childbirth, accidents and famine were constant sources of danger and death. Mortality rates were so much higher than they are now that clans and villages could be wiped out if people did not steadily reproduce. Those not driven to reproduce would then be seen as a threat to the group’s survival, i.e. those attracted to their own gender. I imagine that heterosexuals discriminated mightily against homosexuals in prehistoric times — just as they have in recorded history, though in the absence of the earlier ‘reason’.
Enter the modern world, with its overpopulation, global warming and its vast appetite to consume fossil fuels and most other resources at the fastest rate possible. For civilization as we know it to survive, we now need the opposite of what prehistoric people needed: we need a smaller population. We need people driven to not reproduce.From this perspective, to be gay is to be particularly cool.
I’d suggest with my tongue halfway inside my cheek that at this point in human history, those drawn to non-reproductive forms of sexuality might have an evolutionary advantage over those whose appetites produce children. I love children, and we need a healthy new generation at all times, no matter what. But for heaven’s sake, Propostion 8 should be voted down, and California’s comfort with free choice of marital partners should spread to the other states in the Union.
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