Same Sex Marriage and the Death Penalty

By Brian Dann

 

In 1778 Thomas Jefferson proposed that any man who commits the crime of sodomy receive the punishment of castration, and any women receive the punishment of having a hole cut in the cartilage of her nose of at least one half inch in diameter.  But that’s not the messed up part.  At the time the most common penalty on the books was death. Jefferson was actually a Liberal. During The Holocaust about 50,000 homosexuals were sentenced to death by the Nazis.  There pink triangles that marked them as homosexuals were often used for target practice.  In the United States during the 1930s many in the psychiatric community classified homosexuality as a disease and treated it with such things as castration, lobotomies, pubic nerve surgery, and electroshock treatment.  Homosexuality was actually not decriminalized in the United States until 1961 by the state of Illinois. It took eight more years for another state to follow suit and it was not until 2003 that the remaining 14 states that still classified homosexuality as illegal was forced to take those laws off their books by the Supreme Court case of Lawrence vs. Texas.  That is right, 2003. We like to think that we live in a time that laws like this couldn’t possibly exist but in our life time they did, and in our life time they still do.  In this country we still legislate who can and cannot get married.  Just like in 1778, 1961, and 2003, we have existing laws on our books that put homosexuals in a class below the rest of the population and just like in those times we have politicians and advocacy groups that support these discriminating practices against homosexuals.   And to add insult to injury we have a Presidential candidate who has promised that he will “champion a Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman.”  This quote is directly from Mitt Romney’s campaign web site under the category of Values.
 
Let’s be clear here. This issue is not about homosexual rights.  It is about human rights.  It is about the rights of all people to be treated like equals regardless of their race, sex, religion, physical or mental situation, or sexual orientation.  It is about the rights of any person to love any other person they want to and the right to legally commit their life to that person regardless of their race, sex, religion, physical or mental situation, or sexual orientation.  We do not have laws restricting a Christian to marry a Jew, or a white person to marry an African American, or a person with all their limbs to marry a quadriplegic. Yet we do have laws forbidding a man to marry a man, and a woman to marry a woman.  And the only justification that can ever be given for these outdated, archaic, discriminatory laws is religion.  In a secular country that has no allegiance to any particular religion, a country that is founded on the idea of the separation of church and state, a country that is not a Christian nation nor a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation nor a Hindu nation, the only justification that any politician can ever make for legalizing discrimination is religion.  Ignorance, hate, and prejudice, is what sent 6 million Jews and 50,000 homosexuals to death in Germany.  Ignorance, hate, and prejudice is what put millions of Africans in slave ships and kept their descendents as second class citizens until people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. had the courage to do something about it. And it is ignorance, hate, and prejudice hiding behind the veil of religion that keeps homosexuals from having the legal rights in this country that every other group has, the simple right to marry the one you love regardless of race, sex, religion, physical or mental situation, or sexual orientation.
 
Civil rights never happen overnight.  When Lincoln freed the slaves they were still considered far from equal and it took decades for laws to be passed that gave black people the same exact rights according to the law that white people took for granted.  At one time it was unheard of for a black person to be able to vote in this country and today we have a black man as our President.  And today that President has done what no other leader of this country has had the guts to do. He declared that same sex marriage should be legal in all states in this country, as opposed to being made illegal by a constitutional amendment.  He did this in a country that at one time sentenced homosexuals to death.  And he did this at a time not when he had his re-election in the bag but at a time when making that declaration could had very well cost him his re-election. This president showed this country what it meant to be a leader, to commit to a cause regardless of the outcome, and he has shown all of us what it means to commit ourselves to the cause of equality for all, not unlike Rosa Parks who refused to sit in the back of the bus regardless of the personal consequences. 
 
In this election there are very few make it or break it issues for me but one of my top ones is the issue of equality for all, and that equality extends not just to homosexuals but to all persons whether it is the equal rights of women in the workforce, the equal rights for women to affordable reproductive care, the rights of all people in this country regardless of income to affordable health care, the right of all people to an excellent education, and the rights of homosexuals to marry.  I simply cannot vote for any candidate, Republican or Democrat, who supports any form of legalized discrimination.  If we as a nation choose the unthinkable, to elect Mitt Romney as our next President, a man who has publicly stated that he will “champion a Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman,” (MittRomney.com) we will be choosing to go backwards with all our civil rights.  We will be choosing to support legalized discrimination in this country.  We will be showing the world that we are no better now than we were in 1778 when the most common sentence for sodomy was death.  And if you want to justify bigotry with quoting Jesus, quote this, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” - Galatians 3:28.

 

Mitt Romney on his opposition to same sex marriage, December 9 2011. 

 

Brendan James - "Nothin But Love" - [Official Music Video]

 

 For more on Marriage Equality go to WeGiveADamn.org.

 

What Mitt Romney Really Thinks Of Women

By Brian Dann

 

“We're going to have to have employers in the new economy…that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they're going to be anxious to hire women.”
 
Those were the words of Mitt Romney in the second presidential debate responding to a question about equal pay for women.  This is a sentence he said on national television with an audience of over 55 million people, and felt it was a perfectly OK statement to make.  Just in case you are reading this and saying to yourself, “Yea, what’s your point, so he wants a lot of women to be hired.”  No – that is not what he is saying.  He is saying that he is going to create so many jobs that employers will actually want to hire women! They will resort to hiring women.  There will not be enough men to go around so they will have to hire women.  Boy oh boy women, aren’t you lucky to have this man on your side? So in Mitt Romney’s world, which apparently is a lot like the show Mad Men, women get there fair shot only if there aren’t enough men to fill the jobs.  This says nothing about if they will be paid the same, just that they will get there shot since there won’t be enough men to fill all the slots.
 
In this same exchange Governor Romney also said, and I quote, “I recognized that if you're going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can't be here until 7 or 8 o'clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o'clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let's have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.” 
 
So now you may be saying to yourself, “Uh, what’s wrong with this? Romney’s being sensitive to the special needs of women in the workplace and the demands from their home life.” Let me enlighten Governor Romney and the rest of the GOP to the realities of the year 2012.  It is no longer the sole responsibility of women in the home to cook, clean, and take care of the children.  It is no longer the sole responsibility of women to have a hot meal on the table for when their husbands come home from a hard day at work.  Sometimes it is the husband who has these responsibilities and sometimes they are shared.  In a world of equality of the sexes these are not needs that should be reserved only for women but for both men and women, unless those needs are purely biological.  It is up to individual families to decide who does what roles in the home, which person makes dinner, who cleans the house, and if these roles will be shared or be done by one person.  The flexibility that Mr. Romney says he is so sensitive to should be afforded to both men and women so that every family has the opportunity to be able to balance work and family in a way that they see fit, not because it is a women’s place to cook, clean, take care of the kids, and blow there husband.  In addition the piece that Governor Romney also seems not to be sensitive to is that some families consist of a husband and a husband, so in Governor Romney’s world one can only assume that neither spouse, in this case, would be afforded the flexibility to balance work and family since he seems to think that this balance is only reserved for women.  Of course there is also the case of single fathers, are they afforded the sensitivity and flexibility that Governor Romney would afford to single mothers?  Not according to this statement.  According to this statement women must be treated differently than men because they have a certain place in the family and society that apparently the Governor learned from Leave It To Beaver.   Governor Romney goes on to enforce his position on this by stating that he wants employers to create “a flexible work schedule that gives women opportunities that they would otherwise not be able to afford.”  In 2012 this is not a women issue it is a human issue.  Families and roles have changed and these issues that the governor spoke about need to available to all workers regardless of their sex or sexual orientation.
 
It is clear that Governor Romney sees women differently than he does men.  He has made it clear that he does not support the Lilly Ledbetter act that guarantees equal pay for men and women, and if he does not support this he will not support future legislation.  It is clear that Governor Romney will do everything he can to defund Planned Parenthood making it harder for women to get the essential health care that low income women and women with no insurance desperately need.  It is clear that Governor Romney will put judges on the Supreme Court that will be committed to removing a women’s right to choose. It is clear that when Governor Romney repeals ObamaCare, as he promised to do, women will once again become a pre-existing condition and will again pay more for health insurance then men do.
   
Since I do not have an editor to answer to, and I do not have to be politically correct, I can say this without the fear of anyone censoring me.  Mitt Romney is an insensitive, pompous, chauvinistic, elitist asshole, who sees others as being below him, who will never see women as his equal, who cannot be trusted to maintain his position on any subject because at any moment he may changes his position to suit the situation.  But what I do know is this.  When Governor Romney is not on script, his true colors come out and his views on equality, women, and their role in society become crystal clear as they did in the second debate.
 
“We're going to have to have employers in the new economy…that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they're going to be anxious to hire women.”
 
I guess otherwise, they would only hire men?