December 23, 2010

• VOR: What a Queer World we live in.

  THE VOICE OF REASON: Gays are equal too (or should be)

  President Obama recently signed historic legislation repealing the military’s antiquated “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy which barred homosexuals from openly serving in the military. The California court system is in the process of perhaps overturning the controversial Proposition 8, from the 2008 ballot, which redefined “marriage” between a man and a woman. This effectively stopped the earlier rulings which granted homosexuals the right to form legal marriage unions in the state.

  The debate about homosexuals goes back a long time to when they were “closeted”, afraid to show themselves to the world for fear of reprisals and harm inflicted upon them. According to Wikipedia, up to 20 percent of the population of the world might be either bisexual or homosexual. For the same reasons stated above, there is no really accurate count of homosexuals.

  Humankiind has to put labels on everything, and homosexuality is defined as the coupling of two humans of the same sex. Coupling between members of the opposite sex is heterosexuality, and those who swing both ways are known as bisexuals. There are also people known as transsexuals, who go through life with gender identity problems, owing to odd mixtures of testesterone and estrogen (male and female hormones) in their bodies and sometimes strange genital arrangements.  

  I consider myself somewhat of a liberal thinker. I’ve known many gay people from back when the gay movement hadn’t even begun in earnest, back before the AIDS crisis even. Gays in those days lived two separate lifestyles. They couldn’t be themselves in public, and could only open up in private. This caused a lot of emotional problems for some people, including some people I knew at the time.

  I’ve never been in the military, and I can’t say I ever held a stand on the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. But not too long ago, even with a history of knowing homosexuals and having homosexual friends (one of my roommates was gay) I held the stance that gays shouldn’t marry. I even voiced this opinion on Xanga in comments on anti gay marriage entries.

  I was wrong. And I changed my mind.

  The reasons I believed gays shouldn’t marry weren’t based on moral principles, although I was raised a Baptist in the Christian Church. I know the Bible has been rewritten and redefined over the centuries to favor the ruling elite, and push their programs on the populace at large, so it wasn’t any “Bible verse” which made me feel gays shouldn’t marry. (A lot of the stigma against gays in the Christian faith comes from Old Testament verses. Jesus said to love one’s fellow man, and this could be interpreted  a whole nother way, if one wanted to put another spin on it.) I believed that same sex unions were biologically incorrect. Gays can’t propogate.

  We would all like to believe that we possess common sense, and this dictates our daily lives, and informs our decisions. After a while, my common sense started to nag at me for dissing gay marriage. How can we define “sex” anyway? And should we? There are species which are asexual in nature. There are species which change their sex. There are species where the male is the caregiver to the baby. An obstetrician (doctor specializing in women and childbirth) once told me about some of the things she’s seen during her tenure in medicine. One cannot really split the world into two distinct sexes. There are too many anomalies in nature. Common sense soon told me that I was for some stupid reason being a bit hypocritical and bullheaded (a typical trait of us Taureans, so the astologists would point out).

  I corrected my stance. I changed my mind.

  It is a great day for humankind that the military no longer has to put up with an antiquated policy (actually created during the Clinton presidency, and better than the policy in place regarding gays prior to that, which didn’t recognize their existence at all.) It will be a great day for humankind when all the United States, and perhaps all the world recognizes that whether by choice or by genetic imprinting, there are some humans who prefer making love to and marrying life partners of the same sex.

  Truth be told, I “experimented” a bit with bisexuality in the 70s. I’m heterosexual, but I’m also open minded.

  As should be more people in the world. Most of the rifts dividing competing ideologies seem to concern Christians who are hard liners unwilling to let their common sense permeate their perceived principles. I call myself a practitioner of The Universal Mind, and my belief system is more in line with the Lakota Souix and Buddhism than with the majority of Christian theology, but I still pray to Jesus. He is still a factor in my upbringing. I received no warnings from Him when I changed my mind. Perhaps the world would be a better place if even more people changed theirs.

  Homosexuals are not “damned”. Except in those places where they cannot legally cohabitate and receive the same benefits as opposite sex couples. It’s about time that “gay rights” become “civil rights” and we stop attempting to define them as different. Our gay friends are as human as you and I.

  That’s what I hear when I listen to the Voice of Reason.

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  So I thought I’d come back with a vengeance, and post about a somewhat controversial subject which possibly shouldn’t be so controversial, eh? I wanted to write more “current events” style entires like this in my “Voice of Reason” series, but never got around to creating a graphic/header image. Well, maybe I should just forget about that for now. People need to listen to the voice of reason, and I feel like shouting it out around the Xangasphere. The point of this isn’t necessarily that I have a point of view, or even what is is really, but that I was able to change what I initially thought. This is how the world will become a better place. If people who never thought about changing their minds about something which they have been dogmatically taught, began to change them and “see the light” as it were, which will hopefully someday illuminate all humankind, then the world will become a better place. MFN/ppf

  Posted:  December 23, 2010 7:16 AM

  • 10:14 pm
  • 18 Comments