Rainbow Nation

Very soon, the United States Supreme Court will hand down at least two decisions on marriage equality and gay rights in this nation. I’m not even going to try to second-guess SCOTUS. Gay rights do not directly affect my life. I’m straight, and happily so. But since I have gay friends and I write gay fiction as often as I write straight fiction, I feel like I have to wade in here.

I view gay rights and marriage equality as a societal litmus test. A society that discriminates on that measure is one that will easily discriminate on others. Look at the disturbing stuff happening in Russia right now, as part of the unholy alliance between Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. After outlawing public speech about homosexuality, what will they do next? I’m afraid a thousand years of Russian history might give an indication, and it’s not pretty.

There are similar groups in America who desperately want to do the same thing, out of fear. Why? Because they understand their indoctrination of the next generation can only stick if that generation is kept apart from and ignorant of the outside world. Guess what? The next generation isn’t having any of it. The under-30 crowd tends to view homosexuality as a non-issue. The internet is by far dominated by ‘worldly’ skeptical, humanistic, and scientific topics over religious ones. The world is actually getting a lot less violent than it was 500 to 1000 years ago, when it was much more religious. The looming threats of global warming and possible asteroid impact are not going to be countered by prayers to invisible friends in the sky, but by real people rolling up real shirtsleeves and getting real work done.

So pardon me if I roll my eyes whenever someone makes anti-homosexuality their biggest platform, and religious reasons the basis of their claim.

By now I’ve seen enough rational evidence to show me that homosexuality is not a learned trait, but a naturally occurring one. That nearly every dual-sexed animal species has baseline incidences of homosexuality, so it’s neither ‘wrong’ nor species-harmful. That several studies of human birthrates have shown an increased tendency toward male homosexuality the more children a woman has. That a child raised by gay parents is not going to automatically become gay.

I maintain that we are better than our biology. We have speech, societies, histories, and finely-tuned senses of morality and ethics that – at their core – have less to do with divine guidance than simply the shared experience of co-operation over millions of years. But ‘better than our biology’ is not a pronouncement that ‘gay people are all right as long as they never act on their gay urges’. That’s cruel, petty, and illogical – and hurts society far more than open acceptance.

I ran across this on AbsoluteWrite.com last week, and asked permission of the poster (little_e) to share it. If it offends your sensibilities, then you have only yourself to blame for reading this far:

I pledge allegiance to the flag
Of the United States of America
And to the republic for which it stands,
A rainbow nation, indivisible,
With liberty and justice for all.

For all. Not some. Not just those who bought their way into power, or bullied their way in using hate speech, scare tactics, and tests of religious fervor. Not those whose self-worth seems founded more on casting down others than uplifting themselves.