How Could People Have Been So Stupid? ~Lauren Rizzotto

The debates I seem to get myself into most often these days are on the subject of gay marriage.

On the one hand, many religious people claim it goes against religious rules – but on the other, with the separation of church and state, it seems a given that people should be able to marry whomever they want. The freedom to follow any religion also comes with the freedom to ignore religion – or certain parts of a religion. So how do people think they have any right to tell anyone who they can and cannot marry?

I feel it is important to note here that when I say “whomever they want” I am, of course, referring to “any human they want”. For some unknown reason, people seem to enjoy twisting my words to mean “any creature they want” and going into a completely irrelevant debate about marrying animals.

Changing the subject of a debate is a common “tactic” people use when they realize their arguments are weak, and there aren’t many arguments against gay marriage that make sense.

The first argument that usually comes up is this: gay marriage threatens the sanctity of marriage. Even I can come up with better arguments against gay marriage than “it threatens the sanctity of marriage”. If you feel that your marriage is threatened by someone else’s ability to marry – how secure do you feel about your own religion or your own marriage? You made a decision to marry someone you love according to what you believe. Gay people want to do the same. How does that affect your marriage?

There was a time when people were protesting white people marrying black people. They believed that colored people being able to marry white people threatened the sanctity of marriage. Is that debate really all that different from this one?

On to the next argument: gay parents will raise gay children. The answer to this is obvious – so obvious that I don’t know why people bother bringing it up. Straight parents raise gay people. If they didn’t, everyone would be straight.

This next one, at least, I can understand the assumed logic behind – but a little research quickly disproves it: homosexuality is not natural. It seems to make sense, right? A natural relationship would be one that makes children… right? But look at the natural world. There are at least 450 species of animals that have shown homosexual behavior. This could be anything from occasional displays of affection to life-long bonding. The relationship includes sex, and even adopting and raising orphans.

Think about it – if it wasn’t a natural evolution, it wouldn’t exist. For that matter, maybe it isn’t an evolution at all. Maybe there have been gay people and animals since the beginning.

And now, my personal favorite: only marriages that produce children are valid. What about straight people who are infertile? Should they not be allowed to marry either? If my parents had been able to have children that were biologically theirs, they wouldn’t have adopted my brother and I. Gay parents are in the same situation – they can’t have kids the “traditional” way, but they can adopt, and in my opinion most of them would make great parents. Why? Because they have open, accepting minds, which will be passed on to their children, and I am sick and tired of this world full of close minded people.

The people against gay marriage tend to be religious – people diligently following massive volumes (such as the Bible or the Qur’an) that were written centuries ago. This is something I have never been able to understand. We, as humans, aren’t the same as we were back when these books were written. We don’t dress the same, we don’t act the same and, most importantly, we don’t think the same. Women loathe skirts, men wear pink; standing up straight is strange, as is using real English in letters; no one thinks twice when a kid’s parents are obviously from very different ethnic backgrounds and the worst thing to be accused of is racism. So, with all the discoveries and breakthroughs and understandings that have been made to unite humans, to make us accept each other as we are – why would we, should we, follow a book that was written long before human society became what it is today?

It doesn’t matter if you agree with me or not. No matter what your beliefs, you know that gay people should and will have the same rights as straight people. Whether or not you think gay people are going to hell, whether or not you think being gay is a personal choice and whether or not you think I am completely insane – you all know that gay people deserve the same rights as everyone else. How that affects their afterlife is nothing for you to worry about, and if it’s a choice – then it’s their choice. Sooner or later gay people will win this fight and have the right to be happily (or unhappily) married couples just like the rest of the world. When that happens, the majority of society will eventually accept it as the norm – as they have accepted black people and white people marrying each other.

In a couple centuries, another teenager like myself will sit down to research an essay about marriage and discover some shocking truths, leading him or her to one question: how could people have been so stupid?