Why indifference to "gay marriage" will hurt you

A pro-gay friend on Facebook challenged his opponents, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision, to "Name one vulnerable person who has been harmed by the fact that a handful of people now have tax breaks and visitation rights." The next day, another friend responded by posting the following article, which is well worth the read: Matt Walsh, "Yes, Gay Marriage Hurts Me Personally" (The Blaze, June 30, 2015):

I received a lot of feedback this past weekend about my piece responding to the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling. Many people seemed to take exception to my radical position that men and woman can conceive children. They didn’t explicitly disagree with that theory, but they did deny the one single conclusion that inevitably stems from it, which is that the union between a man and a woman is special and different.

Most of the comments, emails and messages I read this weekend eschewed the process of even attempting to debate that point and skipped right to the insults. Here’s a quick sampling:

Angel: You’re an idiot.

Jonathan: Hi, kill yourself. Thanks

Jim: You’re a f**king clown. That drivel you wrote on the Blaze is the biggest piece of sh*t since Atlas Shrugged. You call yourself a journalist? You’re a f**king mope living in a vacuum of fear and hate. SMFH.

Nikki: I kind of really hope Matt Walsh burns in hell. And that’s really mean to say. But good lord he’s an awful human..

Annie: I’d like to let you know that you are a privileged piece of trash and everything that comes out of your mouth is complete and utter bullsh*t.

Bella: the Supreme Court matters more than some bigot with a sh*tty blog and ugly kids. Try again

Anthony: Oh Matt, you are a perfect assh*le… Take your worthless version of the bible, and set yourself on fire. That would make my Sunday:)

Marc: Matt Walsh is a F**king MORON!

Steven: F**k you, you f**king worthless douche.

Maria: Matt you really are a piece of sh*t.

Brian: The world would be so much better off with you.

Matthew: Go f**k yourself, Walsh. You not only are a bigot, but you ignore facts and twist and distort truths to make your false point. It’s a common tactic I see from people like you. Equality wins out, bigot.

Remember, #LoveWins.

There’s nothing like being called a bigoted pile of garbage in the first sentence and being told in the next that love has won. Indeed, you know love has emerged victorious when a bunch of liberals are screaming in your face, calling your children ugly, and urging you to kill yourself.

Progressivism, as we’ve seen, is a bubbling cauldron of vile, hideous hatred. They dress it up in vacuous, absurd little symbols and hashtags and bright colors, yet the elites who drive the gay agenda are not out to spread love and happiness, but hostility and suspicion. And the obedient lemmings who blindly conform, with rainbows in their Facebook photos and chanting whatever motto they’ve been assigned, don’t really understand what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. The fact that this is the same ideology to come up with vapid slogans like #LoveWins is an irony too bewildering to comprehend.

When our culture was grounded in Christian principles, we used to think of love in the way that St. Paul described it: Love is patient, love is kind, love does not boast, love is not self-seeking. Now in this progressive dystopia, love has suddenly become something that tells you to drink battery acid and die. The difference is slight, but noticeable.

But I wasn’t especially troubled by the progressive lynch mob and their vulgar, wretched, hateful “love.” I’m used to it. I’ve been more concerned by the large number of self-proclaimed Christians and conservatives who’ve repeatedly informed me that the whole gay marriage issue isn’t important. “It won’t affect us,” they tell me over and over again. It’s not relevant to our lives. We aren’t hurt by it. Who cares? It’s all good. Whatevs, man. There are matters more urgent than truth and morality and the future of the human race. Like, what about the economy and stuff?

I’m not proud to say it, but I feel an immense disgust for these Apathetic, Weak, Oblivious, Scared, Distracted, Impotent, Frivolous, Christians And Conservatives (AWOSDIFCACs for short). I’m not saying disgust is the correct emotional response, but I admit I experience it. I can deal with liberals. They’re just wrong about everything. Fine. That’s simple. But AWOSDIFCACs know and understand the truth, yet yawn or shrink away in fear.

The “it doesn’t affect us” mantra has become one of the more common, and absolutely the most damaging, idea circulating through the ranks of the defeatists. It’s a gross and ridiculous lie, one which accomplishes the impressive feat of being wrong in two different ways. It’s wrong when it says we should only care about things that have an impact on our lives, and it’s wrong when it says gay marriage will have no impact on our lives.

First, since when are we only supposed to care about things that will physically or financially affect us? Don’t we normally condemn a person who fails to act or think or speak simply because he, himself, individually, isn’t yet feeling the effect of it? Don’t we criticize a person who doesn’t care until he’s getting punched in the nose by the problem?

When we’re dealing with moral quandaries — questions of right and wrong, truth and lies — it is not a legitimate argument to say “it doesn’t affect me.” It’s effect on you is irrelevant to the issue. What kind of moral idiot measures the impact of a certain evil on his own life and calibrates his concern accordingly? We might all do this sometimes, but it’s a weakness. It’s shameful. It’s cowardice and self-interest. It’s not good. You shouldn’t be proud of it.

Second, as a member of society, State-imposed falsehoods do affect you. Marriage is a certain thing with a certain nature and definition. When the State mandates that the thing is something other than what it is, and has a purpose other than its actual purpose, you are now living under a tyranny of confusion. The severity of that confusion depends on the degree of the falsehood. So if the government announced tomorrow that we must all pretend penguins are elephants and cats are squirrels, I expect I wouldn’t be seriously harmed. I might be helped because I could finally get rid of my wife’s annoying cat on the grounds that I don’t want squirrels in my house.

But I would still oppose this redefinition because it’s not true, and I prefer Truth. How does it negatively affect my life that people are all confused about penguins and cats and elephants? I guess it doesn’t, except that it would make my trips to the zoo pretty disorienting, and more importantly, I want our culture to have a proper understanding of reality. Moreover, I don’t want our government to impose an improper understanding.

An improper understanding of a squirrel is one thing, though. An improper understanding of marriage, on the other hand, will destroy us. Marriage is the bedrock upon which all of human civilization rests. To expand its definition into oblivion is to weaken and destabilize it.

Hurt? Of course. You’re hurt. Everyone is hurt. This is our foundation, and we all depend on it, no matter if we’re separated from the issue by a few degrees. If your house is falling into a sinkhole, would you say it doesn’t hurt you because you happen to be standing on the top floor?

Why do you think liberals care so much about this? If it doesn’t matter, why have they dedicated years to bringing about this past Friday? Because they want gay people to love each other? Nonsense. There was never any law preventing any gay person from loving anyone or anything. The State never had any interest in encouraging, preventing, or otherwise regulating love. The State does have an interest in the foundation of civilization, which is the family. That’s why, up until recently, it recognized True Marriage.

Gay marriage is not an essential or true institution, nor does it serve any real purpose in society. There’s no practical or moral reason for the romantic lives of homosexuals to be recognized or elevated or protected in any way. Even most homosexual activist know this, despite pushing for gay marriage. Gay couples in many cases aren’t monogamous, and gay activists like Dan Savage have been very enthusiastic in extoling the virtues of open relationships and fornication.

This whole gay marriage debate is about opening up the lifelong monogamous bond of matrimony to a community that often doesn’t desire a lifelong monogamous bond. Do you understand what’s going on here? They don’t want marriage as it currently is; they want to change it into something else.

Recently a lesbian activist told an audience of supporters that the fight for gay marriage is a “lie” and that the institution of marriage simply shouldn’t exist. According to her, this really is about destroying marriage, not participating in it. How many times do they have to come out and say it themselves before you understand?

Liberals have long argued the family is an oppressive patriarchal institution that should be abolished. This is, after all, the same ideology that gave us no-fault divorce, divorce parties, the sexual moral relativism that leads to infidelity, and a religious reverence for the act of infanticide. Liberalism encourages the family to eat itself alive. It inflicts grievous wounds on the institution while using those wounds as a reasoning for gay marriage. “Hey, straight couples cheat and get divorced all the time — guess we should have gay marriage!”

But how does the one mean the other? And why would the ideology that has always been so hostile to the family and marriage suddenly be so concerned with allowing more people to enjoy its constricting, oppressive, patriarchal confines?

It makes no sense. That is, until you come to understand that liberals desire not to fortify or strengthen the family, but to dismember it. This is purely a game of power and destruction. Why do you think their victory on Friday prompted such vulgar, bloodthirsty gloating? Did black Americans react that way when they achieved civil rights? Did women respond like this when they won the vote? No, because these groups were actually fighting to participate in, and embolden, constitutional liberties. Modern liberals, for their part, wage a war not of freedom but sabotage. Now with their triumph last week, they act like marauding pillagers who just sacked a village and burned it to the ground. They brag like conquering tyrants, not warriors for liberty. Just ask the Catholic priest who tried to walk by a gay rally this weekend in New York only to be spat on by two gay bullies.

And look at this homosexual staging a mock crucifixion. I don’t remember Dr. King ever doing that. Nor do I recall any civil rights rallies, other than gay pride parades, where men get decked out in assless chaps and drag makeup and engage in all kinds of debauchery in the middle of the street. I definitely haven’t read of any other march, besides gay rights marches, that feature barely clothed children gyrating before a crowd of apparent pederasts. This is the kind of perversion and debasement only found in liberal “civil rights” causes, because that’s what the movement is about. It is focused not on freedom, but on imposing its decayed values on our society.

Affect you? Yeah, I think so.

So where does this go from here?

The first step is the churches. There are already calls to take away their tax exempt status if they oppose gay marriage. Notice when this happens, and it will happen, they will only revoke it from churches, not Planned Parenthood or public universities. Only the churches. And likely only the ones who don’t toe the line. Many churches, although they provide invaluable services to their communities, will not be able to survive the tax burden. Hundreds will close their doors basically overnight.

Next, they attack the churches legally. Remember, liberals tell us gay marriage is a human right — something akin to the right to be free from slavery. To oppose it is to essentially support the dehumanization of gay people. But churches would surely not be permitted to keep slaves, nor would they be allowed to do anything else that actually infringes on human rights. Therefore, if gay marriage is in that category, then the argument is already in place to legally prohibit churches from denying unions to gays.

This is not some kind of dire apocalyptic prophesy. It is dire, and it is apocalyptic, but I’m not speaking as a prophet. I need no divine vision to merely read the words of the Supreme Court and of our country’s most powerful leaders. After the ruling, Hilary Clinton, potentially our nation’s next president (God save us), said:

While we celebrate today, our work won’t be finished until every American can not only marry, but live, work, pray, learn and raise a family free from discrimination and prejudice.

Doesn’t affect you? Hillary Clinton just advertised the fact that she intends to investigate ‘where people pray’ to see if they’re suffering ‘discrimination.’ I would think, in her mind, a gay person being read Romans or Corinthians or Leviticus — the parts where homosexual sex is condemned as abominable and mortally sinful — would qualify as discrimination.

And then there’s Obama who coated the issue in hopey changey frosting, but still pledged to wage a crusade against Christianity:

But today should also give us hope that on the many issues with which we grapple often painfully real change is possible… Shifts in hearts and minds is possible. And those who have come so far on their journey to equality have a responsibility to reach back and help others join them.

Reaching back to help — maybe that’s what those two gay guys were doing when they hocked a loogie on that priest. Just trying to help him along in his journey towards tolerance, I suppose.

Anyway, we’ve already seen this begin to play out. Courts across the country have ruled that florists, bakers, photographers and T-shirt companies don’t have the right to run their businesses according to their Christian faith. They can be, by the logic of state governments and judges around the nation, compelled to lend their services to gay weddings. If they can, why not a priest? Really, why not? If gay marriage is a human right, why should he be exempt?

Frankly, if their reasoning is true, he shouldn’t. And he won’t be for long.

That’s the second step.

Third, as different groups of fetishists enjoy their own time in the sun, you will see the institution of marriage reduced to utter nothingness. Of course, once you erase the importance of procreation and the family, it already is nothingness, but that reality will become more pronounced as the months and years progress.

It’s a very simple equation: If X is the justification for Y but it can also be used to justify Z, then either the premise and/or conclusion is flawed, or both Y and Z are indeed justifiable.

So if gay marriage can be justified on the grounds that homosexuals love each other and wish to be together, then any other group may take that reasoning and, if it can be applied consistently to their situation, use it to gain the same rights. This is how logic works. An incestuous couple can use this reasoning same as gays, so can polygamists, so can bigamists. This isn’t a slippery slope argument. We’ve already slid down the slope, and now here we are, in a place where legal marital rights can be granted to people based solely on their affections. There is no conceivable way to exclude these other groups when that’s the legal argument that just won a Supreme Court case.

The zoophiles will have a bit of a higher hurdle because they can’t necessarily prove consent. But when consent is the only argument left in opposition to copulating with Fido, the dam won’t hold forever. Gay activists know this and don’t care, but they won’t admit it yet. Again, liberals wish to divorce morality from sexuality entirely. They have long been the “if it feels good, do it” crowd. Do you think they actually intend to try and stop the bigamy and incest enthusiasts from having their day? Why would they?

That’s the third step.

Finally, when the churches have been financially blackmailed and legally punished, and marriage has become an institution populated by all forms of depravity and corruption, all that’s left is the end of America, or what remains of it.

Some might say that’s already happened, and I wouldn’t disagree. But eventually we’ll arrive at a point where even the ones who think it “doesn’t affect them” will have to finally face the harsh reality that all of this really does, and always did.

But by then it will be too late.

[Hat tip to D.M.]