The First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This is one of the things that is bothering me about Proposition 8. I know it is a sensitive issue for a lot of people on both sides. But when people start saying hurtful things to those they disagree with, when people are physically attacked for their beliefs, and when we can’t even put up simple yard signs to express our political views on our private property without vandalism and theft, something’s wrong.

America was founded on principles of freedom. Our forefathers left European countries to embrace a lifestyle where they would have more freedom. Religious freedom, political freedom, freedom of speech. No one should ever be attacked for simply expressing themselves in a calm, concise manner. Disagreement does not justify disrespect.

I have a religious belief that homosexuality is an immoral practice. Under the First Amendment, I am free to believe that. It is part of my religious freedom. I also have the right to express my belief without fear of physical harm ensuing. I also have the right to raise my children to follow my religious beliefs, and not have contradictory beliefs pushed on them at school. Other people are free to make a different choice – to be gay, and to express their preference for that lifestyle. However, why should my daughter go to school and have to listen to her teachers telling her that her religion is wrong? We should be teaching tolerance at schools, but not affirmation of lifestyles that are considered by most religions to be wrong.

I’m not sure when we decided as a society that in order to be tolerant of our differences, we had to embrace and promote them. I can be tolerant of my gay friends’ choice without teaching my daughter that a gay lifestyle is a perfectly normal, acceptable lifestyle that is equal to my heterosexual relationship with my husband. I don’t believe it is equal, and I don’t think it is a behavior we ought to be promoting.

If Proposition 8 fails, then my religious freedoms will be infringed upon. As has been evidenced by cases in Massachusetts, parents will not be notified every time homosexuality is discussed in school. If classrooms are going to discuss sexual behavior, then yes, they have to notify the parents. But if they are simply discussing “families” and homosexuality as a social trend, then they don’t have to notify the parents at all. Don’t believe me? Check out the video in my previous post, where a father was actually sent to jail after requesting that he be notified when such things were going to be discussed in schools. And if California schools aren’t excited to be teaching about homosexuality, then why did the California Teachers Association donate $1 million to the No on 8 campaign? I’m apalled that $1 million, which could have been used for books, classroom supplies, and funding of school programs, was taken from teachers’ dues and donated to a political cause which many teachers don’t support. If I paid dues to a union, I would expect them to represent my interests; if people are bound to disagree on a controversial issue, then maybe that’s not someplace they ought to be donating their money.

And before people start commenting about their “right” to get married, go read the Constitution. There’s nothing mentioned anywhere about marriage. No one’s right to be married is guaranteed by our Constitution.

Why I worry about what Proposition 8 means for my kids

Supporters of Prop 8 keep getting told we don’t need to worry about homosexuality being taught in schools, because we will be forewarned and have the choice to keep our children out. What happened to this family obviously illustrates that that isn’t the case. When sex ed is taught, parents will, as always, have the choice to teach their children about it in the privacy of their own homes. But sex ed isn’t the only time homosexuality will be discussed, if Proposition 8 fails.

The family in the video had their child exposed to the idea of same-sex marriage in kindergarten – way before a child needs to learn about such issues anyway. I applaud the idea of diversity. But treating same-sex marriage as equal to heterosexual marriage isn’t about embracing diversity – it’s about calling two very different things by the same name. Apples and oranges, if you will. The relationships are fundamentally different. And by trying to teach our children to be accepting of those few individuals who choose a homosexual lifestyle, teachers end up pushing homosexuality. To get the message across, they have to talk about it more and praise it more than they do a normal, heterosexual relationship.

Children are impressionable, and easily confused. What their teachers tell them at school is very important. How many little kids’ first crush is on their elementary school teacher? They soak up every word they hear. For example, my three year old loves her uncle Trevor. I think he’s probably her favorite relative. Trevor is a very animated person. Whenever he comes over and plays video games with my husband, he has to be very careful what he says. He’s resorted to yelling “Flowers and puppies and happy things!” when something doesn’t go right in his game. All because my little girl adores him and repeats every word he says. (After the “fat cow” incident, we had a little talk about watching his language around her.) Kids adore certain adults, and what those adults do and say leaves a stronger impression on a child than they realize. So if my kid’s teacher tells her homosexuality is a great thing, it’s just as good as your mom and dad’s marriage, she’s going to have a hard time when mommy tells her that’s not what we believe. Children shouldn’t be learning two different sets of standards and morals.

And imagine the fun literature our kids will be reading as they get older. When I was in middle school and high school, we read a lot of literature about the oppression of blacks, about families who experienced horrible things like child abuse, and about turbulence in Latin America. We read about things our school district decided would probably be issues we would hear about in our lives, to help prepare us for the “real world.” Evidently, preparing us for the real world entailed reading about horrible things, difficulty, and diversity, rather than reading any literature from our own culture… So if gay marriage becomes a legalized practice, doesn’t it follow that our children are going to start reading gay literature too? If we represent every other group in our English classes that has experienced what some would term oppression, it seems logical to assume that we will someday at gay literature to that list.

It’s not just something kids are going to hear about in sex ed. They are going to hear about it anytime marriage is discussed. They will be exposed to it when gay parents take our kids on field trips. As the recently squashed Harvey Milk day idea suggests, in the future our kids may be taught to celebrate homosexuality. As I recently blogged about, kids were taken to a homosexual wedding, which was considered an appropriate activity for young children and an appropriate use of school funds.  Our kids will be bringing books home from school that will, in our hearts, horrify us if we don’t believe homosexuality is a moral practice.

And since when did it become the school’s job to teach our children morality? Especially when the school is going to be teaching our children that immoral behaviors are, in fact, moral? Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: Most Americans don’t practice homosexuality. The majority of religious citizens believe that homosexuality is immoral. In our efforts to be politically correct, we have taken the idea of tolerance to a whole new level. Not only do we accept what people choose to do in private, but now we are going to be teaching our children to accept abberant behavior in our public schools. Being tolerant of others’ beliefs doesn’t mean embracing them and teaching them to our children. Just because we are tolerant doesn’t mean we have to legalize what most Americans term immoral behavior.

Private or Public affair?

People who oppose Proposition 8 keep telling me that it is ridiculous to claim that allowing same-sex marriage will affect my life in any way. “It’s only going to allow couples who love each other to be together” they say. Here’s a great example of how this issue affects more people than just the gay couples who want to get married:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/10/11/MNFG13F1VG.DTL

To summarize, if you don’t want to read the whole story, a class of first graders in San Fransisco took a school sanctioned field trip to their lesbian teacher’s wedding. It was decided that this was an appropriate use of school funds – which come from who now? Oh right, that’s the parents, like myself.

Parents were notified and given the option to keep their child out of the trip, and two parents did. But even if those children didn’t go on the trip, they are still being exposed to the idea of homosexual marriage at a very impressionable young age. And you can bet the kids who did go on the field trip will be talking about it to their two classmates who stayed home for days. Most children adore their elementary school teachers at that age, and those kids want their teacher to be happy. What makes her happy? Same-sex marriage. If Prop 8 passes, that teacher will be upset, and so will her students. By the children participating in this same-sex marriage, they have had a firsthand lesson that gay marriage is okay.

I don’t want my children taught about gay marriage in schools. I don’t want my sister-in-law, who is a schoolteacher, to have to teach her pupils that same-sex marriage is an acceptable practice, when it is something she firmly believes is wrong. Gay marriage, whether we like it or not, has influences far beyond being simply a private affair. To believe that it doesn’t affect other families in California is unrealistic.

Opening a discussion

After seeing the huge response that I got to my post on California’s Proposition 8 on my regular blog, I decided to move the discussion to a better location – most of the readers who come to my main blog are looking for updates on my family, not my views on politics. Feel free to join in the discussion, whichever side you believe is right. Just keep your comments clean, and no personal attacks please. We can have a discussion as adults and respectfully disagree without namecalling and hurtful remarks.

Tolerance, and why I support Proposition 8

I would like to think that I am a fairly tolerant person. When some of my friends left the Church in middle school and high school and started drinking and smoking, we stayed friends. I made an effort to be kind to those kids everyone else picked on, having been that kid myself. I had several boys fall in love with me simply because I was the only girl who had ever been nice to them. (Sometimes, being nice and kind has its odd consequences 😉 ) I got picked on a lot in school; I wore glasses, had frizzy curly hair, sang in the choir, was bad at sports, and I was Mormon. Especially because I was Mormon. It still amazes me how many of the pastors in the area I grew up in spent most of their time preaching to their youth about the evil Mormons, instead of on things like abstinence, not taking the name of the Lord in vain, and reading the scriptures. I had friends joke about tarring and feathering Mormons for fun. I watched people march around outside my chapel with signs saying things like “enter here for the gateway to Hell.” Having grown up with people being intolerant of me, I sympathize with those who feel discriminated against.

I have gay friends. I admit it. I don’t think they are horrible people. I don’t preach to them about the evils of their lifestyle. While I don’t think what they do is a good, moral choice that pleases God, I respect their freedom to choose their lifestyle. It is not my place to be their judge. In the case of Proposition 8, though, I feel it is my place to draw the line.

To the best of my understanding, gays have the majority of their rights protected in California. They are simply denied the right to the name of marriage. If Proposition 8 fails, same-sex marriage will, by default, become legalized. (And that’s a point I don’t quite understand… shouldn’t we also have to vote on whether or not same-sex marriage is legal? It seems odd that it will pass into law simply by default if Prop 8 fails.) If same-sex marriage becomes legal in California, people from all over the US will be able to come to California to get married. The issue will carry over into other states, and those states will have to decide whether or not those marriages will be recognized as legal.

In addition, our own pastors, preachers, bishops, and reverends, will have their right to freedom of speech suppressed. Our right to hetereosexual marriage will be suppressed. Our right to freedom of religion will be challenged. How? You might ask. Well, if gay marriage becomes legal, it then becomes illegal to preach against homosexuality. It becomes a hate crime. Our spiritual leaders will be sued. Churches that refuse to perform same-sex marriage will not be allowed to perform heterosexual marriages, on the grounds that doing one and refusing to do the other is discriminatory. If you are not gay, but support gay marriage, think about how you might feel if your own chapel is suddenly hosting gay marriages. Does it change how you feel? If our pastors can’t preach what they believe, and we aren’t allowed to worship as we choose within our church buildings, doesn’t that sound like suppression of freedom of religion to you? It does to me.

I am all about equality. I am all about tolerance. But not when protecting the rights of a minority comes at a suppression of the rights of the majority. Please join me, and vote Yes on Prop 8. To learn more, or to donate, go to http://protectmarriage.com/.

Please, feel free to comment on my post, whether you agree or disagree, but keep it clean. This is a family-oriented blog. If you use profanity, I will have to delete your comment.