Homosexuality? Faith in feelings, not scripture

It is beneath me to respond to outdated bigotry. But the ignorant people of the world make themselves more visible every day, and their beliefs lie so far from my plane of existence that I can classify them only as delusions and hallucinations. These people exist, and they speak, so while I am loathe to bless their inane battle cries with printed words, I know that we, the sane people of planet Earth, must type louder, and more often, if we wish to grind this archaic mythology into a permanent past tense. The idea at work here is that homosexuality is a sin, and therefore should not be protected by law. Yet, if there's one thing I've learned about Christianity in the past few months, straight from the fingertips of e-mail-writing fundamentalists, it's that we're all sinners. According to my new e-mail buddies, I'm not damned to hell because I'm gay -- I'm damned to hell because I haven't accepted Jesus Christ as my savior. Should the government, therefore, cease to protect all non-Christians? Of course not, because governments cannot function on religious dogma, or any dogma for that matter. The hallmark of an effective society is its ability to change -- an ability which is fundamentally threatened by a static scripture that relinquishes humans of accountability and judgment. It's simply easier to fall back on the Bible. But the real world isn't easy enough to fall back on anything. So let's just push religion aside for a moment and speak like members of the secular society in which we live. Yet, once we do that, some secular speakers still insist that homosexuality is a choice. It's laughable that the same people who oppose the tyranny of big government will gladly impose their own tyranny on my feelings, which they claim do not exist. No matter how many conservative scientists or brainwashed homosexuals you herd into a room to say that it's a choice, there is still the simple, and to me, self-evident, fact that I did not choose this, that none of my past boyfriends have chosen this, that none of the gay, bisexual or heterosexual people I've ever known have ever chosen any of their feelings on any subject ever in their lives. Feelings are simply not something you choose. The Pope doesn't choose his. I don't choose mine. And no one on Earth is qualified to tell me otherwise. You can call that emotionalism or subjectivism, but we're not talking about tax policy here, we're talking about love. What is love if not emotional and subjective? You can say that these are the justifications of a pedophile, but I'd like to think that anyone who can competently put on clothes in the morning, let alone attend an Ivy League institution, would clearly understand that active pedophilia is a predatory act upon a child incapable of mature sexual reasoning, whereas homosexual love is a consensual relationship between sexually mature adults. To claim otherwise is an inflammatory scare tactic unworthy of a junior high school debater. "Even if it's a genuine feeling," they might still say, "it is still unnatural and should not be acted upon." I need only point out that all genuine feelings are, by definition, natural, and, in the absence of any apparent negative consequences, there is no reason why two people in love, regardless of gender, should not express that love emotionally and physically, or why a government should not recognize that love as the most natural human feeling there is. In a rare instance of simplicity, the arguments against homosexuality can be easily defeated without resort to ancient texts. So, I'd like to declare this issue closed, declare that homosexual morality is no longer fodder for public debate, that heterosexism will now be treated, unilaterally, by all mainstream media, with the same moral scorn as racism and murder, that the validity of my life is so fundamentally self-evident that verbal justification would elicit the same "duh" as a lecture on the existence of bricks. But recent events have reminded me that declarations of logic don't pack such a hefty punch when active word-processors and soapboxes still amplify anachronistic fascism. If I close this issue, then the only audible voice will be the cries of a false god from an erroneous mythology. So I guess this is the price we must pay for free speech: we must descend below the reasonable realm of sane, autonomous thinkers, to squabble with monsters. We cannot linger in the land of self-evidence -- too much is at stake. So here we are. Beneath ourselves. Does anyone need me to explain bricks?

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