> Marriage is neither a conservative nor a liberal issue…

Bullshit.  Conservatives are making it an issue.  And they’re doing it to drive the hate vote to the polls.  And jackasses like Fauntroy are their useful idiots.  Here he shakes hands with right wing racists, so he can put his thumb in the eyes of gay people.  Not all of whom, he seems not to be able to understand, are white.

> …it is a universal human institution, guaranteeing children fathers…

Fathers…but not mothers? Look at this. Really look at it. Not "guaranteeing children mothers and fathers", but "fathers". Period. He didn’t even think when he said that to include the other half of a heterosexual marriage. That half isn’t important to him. He doesn’t even see it. Look at it. Really look at it. Here’s the root, the stinking rotten core of the anti-gay agenda. It isn’t about preserving a "universal human institution"…it’s about the preservation of male dominance over women. Fauntroy, right there in front of our eyes, all but admits it.

Richard Rodriguez in Salon this week, addressed one big reason why conservative American churches are so afraid of same sex marriage…

American families are under a great deal of stress. The divorce rate isn’t declining, it’s increasing. And the majority of American women are now living alone. We are raising children in America without fathers. I think of Michael Phelps at the Olympics with his mother in the stands. His father was completely absent. He was negligible; no one refers to him, no one noticed his absence.

The possibility that a whole new generation of American males is being raised by women without men is very challenging for the churches. I think they want to reassert some sort of male authority over the order of things. I think the pro-Proposition 8 movement was really galvanized by an insecurity that churches are feeling now with the rise of women.

Monotheistic religions feel threatened by the rise of feminism and the insistence, in many communities, that women take a bigger role in the church. At the same time that women are claiming more responsibility for their religious life, they are also moving out of traditional roles as wife and mother. This is why abortion is so threatening to many religious people — it represents some rejection of the traditional role of mother.

In such a world, we need to identify the relationship between feminism and homosexuality. These movements began, in some sense, to achieve visibility alongside one another. I know a lot of black churches take offense when gay activists say that the gay movement is somehow analogous to the black civil rights movement. And while there is some relationship between the persecution of gays and the anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, I think the true analogy is to the women’s movement. What we represent as gays in America is an alternative to the traditional male-structured society. The possibility that we can form ourselves sexually — even form our sense of what a sex is — sets us apart from the traditional roles we were given by our fathers.

He goes on to say…

But the real challenge to the family right now is male irresponsibility and misbehavior toward women. If the Hispanic Catholic and evangelical churches really wanted to protect the family, they should address the issue of wife beating in Hispanic families and the misbehaviors of the father against the mother. But no, they go after gay marriage. It doesn’t take any brilliance to notice that this is hypocrisy of such magnitude that you blame the gay couple living next door for the fact that you’ve just beaten your wife.

Some folks just really need their scapegoats, someone else to blame for all their own pathetic failures of moral character. Fauntroy being one of them. Fauntroy is villifying gay people, cowering from behind the very institution he is pretending to defend, half of the people in which he can’t even see, and clearly does not care one whit about.

> …and pointing men and women toward a special kind of socially as well as
> personally fruitful sexual relationship.

Same sex couples contribute to their communities too. Fauntroy would know that, if he ever bothered to look at our lives from somewhere else besides his pathetic bar stool conceits. And sexual intimacy between loving, devoted same sex couples is just as fulfilling to them, as to opposite sex couples. Fauntroy would know that too, if he could see the people for the homosexuals. But he can’t see the lives of gay people any better then he can see the lives of women. Look at this:

> Gay marriage is the final step down a long road America has already traveled
> toward deinstitutionalizing, denuding and privatizing marriage. It would set
> in legal stone some of the most destructive ideas of the sexual revolution:
> There are no differences between men and women that matter…

This is the misogynist’s view of the sexual revolution. Suddenly, women didn’t have to stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen to have meaningful lives. Suddenly they could have careers of their own, reach for their own dreams, meet men on equal footing in the workplace and in the home. And nightmare of nightmares, suddenly women could own their own bodies, instead of being owned by men. Suddenly women could enjoy sex for its own sake just like men do, delight in the beauty and sensuality of their own bodies as women, not just as objects of male lust. For generations little girls reaching womanhood were told that they weren’t supposed to enjoy sex, but give themselves over to men for the sole purpose of bearing their children. In some parts of the world, where Conservative religious cultures reign supreme, young women routinely have their genitals mutilated so they cannot experience sexual pleasure. This is considered righteous.

If all the sexual revolution did was make it easier for boys to get laid then the conservative churches would be singing it’s praises today. But it did the unforgivable…it liberated women too. The differences between men and women that Fauntroy laments the passing of, is the one where women were supposed to know their place. You know…like black people were supposed to, once upon a time…

> …marriage has nothing to do with procreation…

And neither do anti same sex marriage amendments. You will Never see the gay haters trying to get amendments passed that require fertility as a precondition of marriage. They don’t give a good goddamn about the procreation of children, only the procreation of their cheapshit hatreds, and their entitled status as heterosexual males.

> …children do not really need mothers and fathers…

Children need to be loved. But you will never hear the likes of Fauntroy saying that love is the most important part of a marriage, because it is the one thing they are incapable of bringing to it. When all you can see in a marriage is about male dominance over women, you cannot let love for your spouse be a part of marriage, let alone love for your children. And it shows. The so-called bible belt has more incidence of spouse abuse and child abuse then any other part of the country, particularly the parts that reliably vote liberal. Oh…along with the highest incidence of illiteracy and teenage pregnancy and STDs. Fat lot of good all this ostentatious piety is doing children.  I’ll not endure lectures on how bad same sex marriage is for children from louts who have never shown anything like the interest in improving the lives of children that they have in denegrating the lives of gay people.

> …the diverse family forms adults choose are all equally good for children.

Love. Love is good for children. Try to wrap your head around that concept. Love. Love. You want to know why the so-called bible belt has the highest rates of divorce? It’s because the pulpits down there keep preaching that marriage is about opposte sex genitals.

A marriage is about love, or it is about nothing. A marriage is between equals, who love, honor and cherish one another. It is not the master-slave relationship between men and women Fauntroy wishes it to be.  The problem with same sex marriage isn’t that it makes gender irrelevant, but that it makes it unabiguously clear that the two people united under its wings are Equals. Fauntroy and his kind would rather burn the chapel down, then admit that women are people too, let alone that they are their equal half of a human race.  You want to know why so many marriages end in divorce, here it is laughing in your face.  This isn’t rocket science.  If you don’t respect your other half going into in a marriage, don’t be surprised when it ends up in divorce court.  It is not the people who are insisting that the bedrock of marriage is love who are destroying marriage.

> What happens in my heart is that I know the difference.

Maybe someday his heart will know what it is to have a conscience. Then he won’t have to feel his world is being threatened by people in love.

> Don’t confuse my people, who have been the victims of deliberate family
> destruction, by giving them another definition of marriage.

You can suppose here, that gay black Americans are not his people too. Gay black Americans like Bayard Rustin, who organized the 1963 March On Washington. Fauntroy just spent the better part of a paragraph spitting on his grave, and putting a knife into the heart of every gay African-American who ever walked the American soil, and who get spit on in one instant by white racists for being black, and then in the next instant get spit on for being gay by other black people. Aren’t the gay sons and daughters of the slaves whose hands built this nation too, with their blood and tears his people also? Apparently not. And…heterosexual black women..? He seems to have difficulty remembering that they’re one half of an opposite sex marriage. Just who the fuck Are his people anyway? Near as I can see from this, the only ones he considers His People are black heterosexual males.

There’s the problem. It’s not the difference he thinks he sees between men and women, or between this family and that. It’s that his heart is too goddamned small to see anything but himself in a mirror.

Yours too…apparently. Well I reckon that explains why marriage can’t be about love.