Teamwork needed

Good luck, Matthew. I will be voting "No" on Prop. 8

Adam and Eve (Not Steve)

People do deserve dignity and respect, but the problem is marriage is a sacred term for many people even though people don't treat marriage with respect. I am against 8 as well, but there is a good number who would support a parallel institution like civil unions, but we'd hear people in the non-straight community saying its separate not equal.

Imagine if the majority in their straight relationships did not have the rights and privileges marriage entitles, maybe you all could understand why 8 needs to be defeated.

In reply to the first Matt, of Alta Loma::

First, Matt of Alta Loma. Kudos for your letter. But if you are to remaiin outspoken, be prepared for several kinds of obstinate minds that will not listen and learn. First, are the knuckle-draggers who will throw a hash of kitchen aink folk wisdom at your arguments. They may even turn to the Bible, but will prive to be at best Sunday Christians only. Another kind is too caught up in a perpetual homosexual panic to think clearly on any issue regarding gay people. They operate out of a reactive mode, and lash out as a way to keep the "strange attractivenss of others" at bay. In other words, they have many personal and unresolved issues at stake. The third kind is very common here in Suburbia, home of he neighborhood MEGA-Church. minds of this kind are oblviious to the language and meaning of modern democracy, secular civilization and history, and the Enlightenment mindframe of the American founders. They are largely caught up in a worldview dominated by the farscial claptrap of Dispensational Pre-Millennialism. Our world is loathsome, and so are its institutions.to them. And they have little interest in making a deep investment in perpetuating it. They awaot the rapture, and look forward to signs that it is coming, which invests them in looking forward to decline, collapse, and growing fragmentation and anarchy.

We see gay people as always being here, in good times and bad. We see events such as gay liberation as historical progression. A clearing away of injustice and superstition. But many others are in Ahmedinejad lotusland, and see same sex relations as a modern development, and as something imposed by outsders. Be prepard to confront the 14th, the 16th, and other past centuries of treacle and murderous legacies.

In reply to Matt from Ontario:

Matt, I know you to be a friend of a sort. Not that we agree on all things, but becasue you are seem to strive to be fair, informed and logical. I think it is possible that we have met, years ago (Circa 1982) in a class at Chaffey College. If so, your parting words were very encouraging and kind.

We disagree in regard to the basic sacredness of Marriage and in regard to civil unions v. full marriage equality. First, marriage as we know it now is a development not fully rooted in old sacred teachings or Church history. In the West, marriage did not become a sacrament until the early 13th century. Before that, it was a civil and familial contractual arrangement blessed as a contract by the Chuch. In Roman and Greek days, priests of the pertinent Gods and Goddess would have blessed contracts involving the sale of land or of a cow. How sacred is that?

Modern marriage arose in the last few centuries first to infuse the bond with romantic meaning, which brought on the second developmental factor; its money-making potential to those who sell all the trappings required. Overall, even the totally civil components of modern marriage, from taking out the license to getting all the civil benefits have been infused in a fog of sacred tradition that isn't sacred nor traditional. Don't concede too much Matt to the things other people believe to be true, especially when it isn't true, and is used to repress others.

Second, we are not that advanced as a nation, a state or a people to give Plessey V. Ferguson a second try. Read the opinion of Chief Justice George where it concerns the critical issue of Dignity as a component of real equality. Under "Separate but Equal," it was considered undignified to refer to a white man of 30 as "Boy," but it was considered a measure of a 99 year old black man's dignity to call him a "Boy," and to treat him less than a nine year old white child could expect. Again, don't concede too much to those in homosexual panic.

Thank you, Mr. Bowman, for refrainng from name-calling in your informative editorial on the merits of gay marriage. Unfortunately, for the voters of Califonrnia, a small group of people (the California Supreme Court) made a decision contrary to the will of the majority (the people.) Are you concerned about the issue of fairness? How many consenting adults voted to keep marriage strictly defined as between a man and woman?

Advocacy for homosexual rights is not akin to human rights, although the media (and apparently the Supreme Court) has made little effort to distinguish between the two. Comparing the desire of homosexuals to gain legal marital status to the mistreatment of Blacks (leading up to the Civil Rights movement) is unconscionable. Whether or not homosexuals are legally allowed to marry will not make homosexuality "normal," which is the 800-pound gorilla no one seems willing to notice or address.

Mr. Doyle:

What defines normal?, and does variation from the norm entitle discrimination and social stigma?

Homosexuality is a minority orientation, to be sure. But it has always been around, and springs from the same largely heterosexual gene-pool that produces left handedness, blue eyes and non-white skin coloration. Do we discriminate or criminalize against these variations from the human global norm simply because they are not the norm?

The critera of normality, as you seem to use it, is actually conflated with un-naturalness. In regard to what we have termed "homosexuality" since the late 19th century, the charge of un-naturalness was first artculated by the Catholic Chruch in the 13th century. And what defined "natural and un-natural" to the Church back then? And still does today? A mishmash of badly understood and translated wisdom taken almost entirely from the works of Aristotle, a gay man himself.

And what exactly in the Church's thinking made same-sex relations unnatural and not "normal?" A hash of contradictory justifications for making it so taken from Aristotle. And what in Aristotle justified a classification of "unnatural and not normal?" The so called scientific "facts" found within that stated: 1) that same-sex relations are not found in the animal world, 2) that some mammals we are familiar with are actually hermaprodites, and 3) that certain animals reproduce via their mouths.

All these and other "facts," were used to contruct arguments against homosexuality. All were used to hype up persecutions and brutal executions of gay people. And all were wrong, and often nonsensical.

When you charge that things gay are not "normal," tell us what you mean by that. A whole lot of pure B.S. and illegimate criterias have been deeply sublated into what most people mean when they throw out this charge.

And if you don't know what "sublated" (taken from "sublation") as I use it means, look it up. It's from Hegel and you can probably use that little brushing up on Western classical phiosophy.