Come On Out, Y’all! - by Philip

Despite being a straight, middle-aged white man with a conservative upbringing, I still have absolutely no idea why California passed Prop 8 last year. For those of you who, for whatever reason, don’t follow California state politics religiously, we somehow managed to support Barack Obama for president last November, while simultaneously adding an amendment to our constitution stating that marriage is strictly between a man and a woman. I know what you’re thinking – it was just a matter of time before such a stalwart bastion of conservative ideology as California passed that kind of proposition. Still, I have to wonder how it happened.

Let me start by giving you a bit of my background: I grew up in a tiny town in rural north Louisiana called Simsboro, so I never really had much reason to think about the gay. After all, there were no gay people in north Louisiana in the 1980s, so what was there to think about? For some reason, there are plenty of homosexuals there now, so there must have been some kind of immigration from less Christian towns, such as Memphis or –God forbid– Austin.



In 1984, I moved to a different high school in Natchitoches (it’s pronounced “Nack-uh-tish,” you friggin’ yankee), and was interested to discover that there were exactly two openly gay people among the 350 students there – hi, Harrison and Stoney! Maybe the gays were all flocking to towns with difficult-to-pronounce names. I’ve since read that 5-10% of any given population is gay (other than Iran’s, apparently), so there was clearly something going on that I wasn't aware of.

For those of you who have seen through my subtle sarcasm, the real story is obviously that there were (and are) plenty of gay people in north Louisiana, just like everywhere else. But if you think it would have been difficult to tell your parents that you were gay in such liberal strongholds as San Francisco or Manhattan in the 1980s, try doing it in Simsboro, Louisiana, where people go to church more than once a week and spend most of their time there gossiping judgmentally about people who are different from them, just like the bible says.



But that was then, and this is now, right? Surely, there’s no reason today for us to pass a constitutional amendment that prevents gay people from being married and not, say, Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley. Seriously, what was that all about? And despite all of the warnings from the religious right, there seem to be no actual consequences to gay marriage. In all of the states and countries that have legalized gay marriage, there has been no commensurate progression to people marrying livestock and no crippling implosion of the institute of heterosexual marriage. I guess even Jerry Falwell got it wrong every once in awhile.

So why did Prop 8 pass? It seems to have nothing to do with homosexuality at all, just a base human instinct to fear or at least mistrust people who are different from ourselves. And since 90-95% of the population is straight, that poor little 5-10% of different people never had a chance. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go write to my senator asking for us to start requiring the 5% of our population who enjoy bowling to register as enemy combatants. How can you trust a bunch of drunk guys who cup their big balls in their hands before hurling them at a neatly arranged stack of penis-shaped objects? If that’s not an attack on heterosexuality, I don’t know what is.

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