We Had A Talk

The extent of my political involvement is to vote, talk to my co-workers and friends about issues, and donate a small amount of money (more than I can afford!) here and there, but as I didn't get out and volunteer and work countless hours, like so many people, to defeat the Wisconsin anti-gay marriage amendment, I feel like I shouldn't even complain here in my own journal. But since I am so freaked out about it, I'm going to say something briefly. I guess I live in a rather sheltered world, among reasonable, intelligent people, and so I couldn't even imagine the majority of people in Wisconsin voting for something so obviously insane and hateful. I figured it would just be those guys who yell "Fuck you" at me out of the window of their pickup truck while I'm on my bicycle, just before they speed off to the highway ramp. But to quote George W. Bush (the first and last time I'll ever do that) "Show's you how much I know."

I couldn't even sleep last night because I was thinking about this so much. Are there really THAT many people who hate gay people THAT much? I know a lot of individuals and groups have said they don't HATE gay people at all, but they don't think they should be allowed to be married. I don't think I even need to comment on something like that. What is marriage all about, anyway? I thought about that for a long time. I have thought about that a lot in the past, because I have been very critical of marriage as an institution, yet I have wanted to respect and support friends and family who decided to get married. If marriage is only about legal status, okay, that's fine, but I don't want anything to do with it at all. And if it's about religion, again, I want nothing to do with it. But in that case, shouldn't Christians be insisting that non-Christians not be able to be married? Maybe they do, in some cases, I don’t know. The people I know who have become married insist that it's about love, and I have to respect that, but when you start to tell people who they can or cannot love, THAT is a problem. If the law tells people they cannot love someone else, at least that expression of love that is marriage, doesn't that make all marriage as expressions of love problematic?

These were the kind of circles I was talking myself in, sleeplessly, until I finally worked myself into a kind of trance. And it was at that point that God spoke to me. This was a very strange, unique experience, nothing like I would have ever imagined "God speaking to me" would be like. God didn't say this was right and that was wrong, or direct me to a church or the Bible. If anything, God calmed me down and helped me to see a more harmonious relationship between emotion, belief, perception, and the intellect. Calling people names and dismissing them outright isn't going to accomplish anything. It's important to respect people I don't agree with as human beings, as difficult as that is sometimes. That's a hard thing for me to accept, as a cold killer, just as God talking to me is hard to accept as a non-Christian. But I wouldn’t call myself a non-believer, not before, and certainly not now. That same sex couples have the right to be in love and thus be married was something I believed, but now it is something I know.