“[W]e must remember that every American deserves to be treated with tolerance, respect, and dignity.”  That’s what President Bush said during his radio address yesterday.  That would be the same radio address in which he attacked homosexuals and vowed to inject discrimination and hatred into our most sacred declaration and guarantee of freedom and liberty: the Constitution.  The man is a hypocrite and purely evil.  To stand and say we deserve tolerance, respect, and dignity while at the same time attempting to ensure we will never be tolerated, respected, or treated with dignity by making us the only class of citizens specifically denied rights by a constitutional amendment is the height of arrogant animosity and duplicity.  Does he truly think successfully passing this amendment will ensure the GLBT community receives the tolerance, respect, and dignity to which he refers?  How laughably ignorant.

We are yet again discussing the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA), a tool so insidious that it speaks volumes of the contempt held by Christians for anyone who is different and will not adhere to their way of thinking.  Essentially, if you’re not like us, you deserve no rights and certainly no equality.  This is the most repugnant example of bigotry ever conceived, and to feel it worthwhile to sully our nation’s most sacred document and guiding principles with such garbage is wholly anti-American.  More importantly, it is anti-Christian.  It appalls me that so few of them know their own faith well enough to realize that.

And while our government is focusing on this attempt to write hate into the Constitution, to use that document to reduce the rights of a certain class of citizens to ensure they are never equal or treated like everyone else, our country spirals down the dark path of collapse due to the inattention of our elected officials.  Where is the equal concern and focus on education, the economy, emergency preparedness (especially in light of the hurricane season), poverty, homelessness, our military’s use of torture and massacres and inhumane treatment of prisoners, terrorism (a war we have not addressed since the invasion of Afghanistan), environmental protection and definitive action to address global warming, a fair and equitable tax system, corruption in the highest reaches of our government, and the great many other real problems facing our nation today?  Instead of focusing on matters of critical importance, we dance the ghastly dance of hate for our own people.

The amendment will not pass, and that is in itself a good thing.  Such a failure does not negate the state of our union, however, one in which the self-proclaimed moral majority wishes to impose its collectively misguided and selectively chosen and enforced ethics on minorities.  This is the opposite of what America stands for.  Our country has always been the shining light of hope for equality and minority protection from the majority.  How did we ever go so far astray?

Consider why it is that America has always abhorred the human rights violations in Iran and China yet readily supported both nations in their attempts to squelch the voice of homosexuals in the public square, even going so far as to support both countries in the United Nations when they chose not to vote for granting the GLBT community a voice in matters of global human rights.  We are not exporting democracy; we are exporting Christian hate and intolerance, and then we wonder why Muslims act the way they do.  It is because America tells them it is perfectly OK to hate and to subjugate those who fail to adhere to your own religious dogma.  What a barbaric, dare I say primitive faith.

I challenge you to consider this:  It always starts with taking rights away from one group, singling them out for discrimination, but it never stops there.  If you can so easily do this to homosexuals, what will you do when you find yourself in the next group targeted for public humiliation and legal discrimination?  Once we begin promoting the segregation of our people in the name of granting rights to individual groups, we jeopardize the freedom of all.

Let me close by drawing your attention once again to a letter by Sharon Underwood, a Vermonter who wrote to a local newspaper after she’d had enough of the anti-gay movement in her own state.  You see, she’s heterosexual, but she has a gay son.  Considering homosexual teenagers are the largest suicide statistic on the planet, read what she had to say and then ask yourself what this continuing hatred and intolerance will mean to people like her son.  You can see the letter here.

As she so aptly queries, what ever happened to striving to be better humans than we are?