anythings.org

What can I say, I’m not surprised. With Alito’s confirmation, this was pretty much going to be the only decision we saw handed down. The most disgusting part, the most frightening part, the most ridiculous part of this decision is that they made it without any considerations for a woman’s health. There is absolutely NO exceptions to this ruling: if a woman has a choice of dying or undergoing “partial-birth” abortion, she no longer has that choice. She has to die. You would think that even the most conservative person would want there to be an exception to this ruling for life or death circumstances.

The ramifications of this event are going to be severe.

Links for people who want to know more:
Information on the decision
Opinions and articles
AP story
Opinions of Presidential hopefuls

I think the most painful thing to read is that the Republican candidates for President support the decision made by the Supreme Court, even though it can potentially put a mother in danger. The Christian Right wants to raise live babies so they can go be dead soldiers (thank you, George Carlin) in their fruitless conquests that are motivated by exteremly ethnocentric reasons - not to mention to settle daddy’s squabble.

So - answer me this: if that fetus you saved at the cost of its mother’s life turns out to be gay, how much will you care about its rights then?

I think Obama said it best:
I strongly disagree with today’s Supreme Court ruling, which dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women. As Justice Ginsburg emphasized in her dissenting opinion, this ruling signals an alarming willingness on the part of the conservative majority to disregard its prior rulings respecting a woman’s medical concerns and the very personal decisions between a doctor and patient. I am extremely concerned that this ruling will embolden state legislatures to enact further measures to restrict a woman’s right to choose, and that the conservative Supreme Court justices will look for other opportunities to erode Roe v. Wade, which is established federal law and a matter of equal rights for women.

If there’s one thing in the United States you can say to a room with pretty much any demographic and get an extremely negative response from a large amount of people, it’s “tell me how you feel about special rights”. We have this obsession with denying people “special” rights, which kind of goes against American individualism, but that’s an entirely different topic.

I never really could put my finger on what it was that bothered me about the Christian Right being so against LGBTQI rights. Other than the fact that they’re being complete bigots with no respect for human variance, I couldn’t really figure out what about their arguments bothered me so much.

And then I read this book*, and it all made sense.

The Christian Right argues that LGBTQI individuals should not be allowed access to marriage, adoption processes, and other civil rights due to their sexuality**, which they see as a sin. They also see a homosexual orientation as being a choice. Because they see this “behavior” as wrong (at one point, it was criminal) and preventable, they view the LGBTQI community as asking for special rights that allow them access to the insitutions that privilege heterosexuals. The process goes something like this: if sin as a choice, and homosexuality is a sin, then homosexuality must be a chosen path. This argument is, essentially, flawed because it is based on the idea that being LGBT(QI) is a choice. (For the sake of time and length, I am not going to go into LGBTQI as being inborn v. chosen v. environmental debate. My reasons for this are because the Christian Right does not, so I do not need to do so to deconstruct their argument.)

The flaw was not obvious to me at first. And then I saw it.

Religious identity is a choice. And according to the Christian Right, being LGBT(QI) is also a choice. If religious identity wasn’t a choice, it would be assigned in the ways that gender and race are. Religion is, however, a chosen identity.

Religion is, also, protected by the Consitution. Sexuality is not. This is special rights. The Christian Right’s response to this accusation is that they are not special rights because the designers of the Consitution put them in there, so they shouldn’t be removed. While it is true that religion was added into the Consitution and is protected by law, this response to the argument that religious identity does not dodge the issue of special rights. This still doesn’t answer the question of why religion gets protection but sexuality does not.

Now, this contradiction could be avoided entirely if the Christian Right changed their position on the origin(s) of homosexuality. However, if the Christian Right changes their position on homosexuality from that of choice to something else (either inborn, environmental, or a myriad of other factors that are still under debate), they can no longer blame the homosexual individuals for their “sins”. If homosexuality is no longer a choice, then same-sex sexual acts are no longer a sin. If homosexuality is no longer a choice, then it should be just as protected as other identities, including race, sex, gender, ethnicity, class, education level, religion, etc.

There are no federal laws preventing job discrimination based on sexual orientation.

There are no federal laws to protect hate crimes against LGBTQI individuals (there are, but they are very limited and only apply if the crime is committed during/after a federally protected act or on federal property). Hate crimes are not thought crimes. Hate speech? Well that’s a fine line I’m not prepared to walk (again, time and length), but not everything you say is protected by “freedom of speech” and there’s nothing wrong with that.

As of 2004, there are 1,138 federal benefits of marriage that are denied to same-sex couples as civil unions or domestic partners.

These aren’t special rights, they’re equal rights. I don’t understand the hatred.

* Please take note that this book was written published in 1999, so it doesn’t have information on Lawrence v. Texas or the goings on in Massachusetts.

** I use the acronym LGBQTI to encompass the entire community, which the Christian Right as rallies against as a whole. While the propoganda on “sexuality” targets LGBTQ individuals, it does not talk about intersexed people. Intersexuality is not a sexuality, it is merely a biological welding of the male and female genders together in some way. Even though the Christian Right does not explicitly mention anything against intersex individuals in their anti-gay rhetoric, I’ve included it in the acronym because they church targets the entire community with their tactics.