What the Right Gets Wrong: Gay Agendas

Phil and I are hoping to buy a home this year. Beyond that, I'm looking forward, in 2010, to deepening my involvement here at Change.org and seeing my husband’s theatre company continue to prosper. That’s my gay agenda. Frightening, isn’t it?

Oh, all right. I also want "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" to go down in flames, the Respect for Marriage Act to pass with flying colors, and the Boies/Olsen Prop 8 lawsuit to strike down that hateful amendment once and for all.

I suppose this sounds more like the “gay agenda” that the lunatic fringe at the edges of the far right is always talking about. But in spite of their hysteria, nothing in my goals should rightly bother anyone. Really, all I’m talking about is freedom and equal treatment. I am definitively not interested in curtailing anybody else’s rights, impacting anybody else’s lifestyle choices, or impinging on any person’s, group’s, or organization’s freedoms. So what's the problem? And who has the real "gay agenda" here, anyway?

When I was in fifth grade, my teacher taught us that “your rights stop at the end of your nose.” He meant that it’s not OK to impose your will on others to their detriment, or to try to grab freedoms that cause harm to others. We gays and lesbians are obeying this moral guidance perfectly in our current political battles. The rights we want affect only us — or, if anything, actually make things better for our neighbors. With marriage and overall equality, we become more committed, valuable members of our communities, and more children get to grow up in households with stable, married parents. Good, right? You’d think more conservatives would be jumping on the bandwagon.

But instead, they have a very different approach. They, unlike us, are determined to enforce not only their rights, but their will way beyond the ends of their noses. They want to reach into our homes and beds, not to mention our children's rooms, our schools, and the lives of our parents, friends, sisters and brothers. They want to wreak havoc in all these places, to dishevel our committed lives and destroy our happiness. Not only do they want to do damage to us, they’re not even increasing their own happiness or rights as they do it. They are fighting to keep us down out of pure dislike for who we are and what we stand for. When Charles Cooper, the attorney representing Prop 8 in Federal court last month, was asked exactly what harm gay marriage would cause to society, he couldn’t come up with an answer. Not a single example of damage. Yet anti-marriage equality forces feel justified in marginalizing us and severely curtailing our freedoms in their attempt to elevate and mainstream their own narrow, religion-based interests.

Our opponents may or may not be motivated by hatred or bigotry in a technical sense. But what they most certainly are not motivated by is any reasonable desire for good, or to increase the general happiness of  society. They are, at best, unconscionably selfish. At worst, positively malevolent.

Contrary to what our opponents claim, the things we're fighting for — marriage, adoption rights, protection from hate crimes, the right to serve openly in the military — will not make the slightest difference in their lives, churches, the public schools, or Afghanistan. We simply want to be able to live our lives privately, happily, and equally.

They respond to these goals by telling us we're sick and trying to brainwash us into a pretend heterosexuality, by denying us the right to publicly commit to our loved ones, by curtailing our abilities to visit and support each other when we're ill, by denying us the right to sponsor our loved ones to come live with us in the U.S., by denying us the chance to defend our country, and by generally trying to push us back into the closet and have us kowtow to their extremist worldview in complete denial of the principles of justice and religious non-interference on which the U.S. was founded.

Now that’s a scary gay agenda.

Photo credit: Cristian Asher