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I was looking at away messages when I should have been adding users access rights when I came upon Katie’s. In it she links to this column by Howard Troxler from the St. Petersburg Times. This pretty well sums up most of what I feel about the so-called right-wing conservative agenda. The recent voting on banning of same-sex marriages is pretty outrageous to me. Some people would actually like to make a Constitutional amendment that forbids the marriage of two people of the same sex because it is a threat to the whole institution of marriage. I see no reason why the two recent marriages of Britney Spears are any less of a threat to the institution of marriage, yet I hear very little about anyone wanting to make a Constitutional amendmendment preventing marriage without love, marriage without much thought put into it, or marriage due to unplanned pregnancies. I know a few gays and lesbians, and I see no reason why they should be denied the same rights as me. Now that I am married, I can be present in the ER if my wife ever goes to the hospital. I can basically get everything my wife leaves me, including children, if she were to pass away. Whatever I tell Chris since we’ve been married cannot be used to incriminate me in a court of law. I can even divorce her and sue for a good portion of her assets, if it ever came down to it (not that I was planning on it). Yet gays and lesbians cannot equally partake in these freedoms or rights or whatever you want to call them simply because most states on the Union do no recognize same-sex marriage as a union protected under the Constitution, federal or state. But back to the column by Troxler, he points out the following:

If we are going to start ranking the "sins," marriage between two gay people who love each other and seek a lifelong commitment doesn’t even make the Bible’s best-known top-10 list. … On the other hand, you know what IS right smack in the Ten Commandments? Adultery. Adultery! Now, that’s a threat to the institution of marriage. You bet. Half of heterosexual marriages in our society end in divorce. We heterosexuals are doing a lousy job of "defending" marriage. Adultery is a big part of the reason. So if we’re going to rewrite our Constitution to "protect" marriage from sin because it is the "God-ordained bedrock of society," then I would think that adultery would be a much better target.

Pre-marital sex can also be a threat to the institution of marriage, but I don’t see a big movement preventing non-virgins from getting married (unless, of course, the non-virgins are gay). Why do people have to be so oppressive? And why in such a hypocritical way?