My Letter to CNN

CNN offered for email responses to How the passage of the no same sex marriage amendment would affect me. This is my response:

Of course it affects me. It affects everyone in the country. We are talking about basic rights for citizens of this once great country. I'm a straight male, but I have friends who are homosexual and to think that my government would blanketly decide that my relationship was better than that of my friends' seems like a bastardization of what this country once stood for. It diminishes all of the work that our parents and ancestors did to bring equality for everyone. I don't understand the reasoning behind this amendment. The defense that banning gay marriage is a way to uphold the sanctity of marriage seems to me to fall on the side of ridiculous. With the divorce rate hovering at the 50% mark and that number not even representing the number of married people involved in extramarital relationships, it seems absurd to me that there is concern about the 'value' of the marriage union. How much further can this value decrease by allowing two partners who love each other to marry? How can we have a country in today's age that so blatantly accepts and encourages the discrimination of a specific group? How is it that two neo-nazis can marry but not two upstanding homosexuals? This opens up another debate. If the Bible says two people of the same sex can't marry, and let's face it, this is based completely on religious beliefs, where does it stop? In 20 years is it going to be two Jewish people? Muslim? How far does this go? How long do we allow for the stripping of our rights before we all stand up together and say, you know what, this is wrong. I'm not going to let this happen. To quote Broadcast News..."I'm tired as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
I think as Americans who fight everyday for 'freedom,' 'liberty,' and other such word we seem so willing to toss around without seeming to understand their meaning, I think it is our right, it is our duty to stand behind all of our citizens and fight for their right to all civil liberties and rights.




These times in this country are very scary and it is our duty to figure out a way to stop these civil attrocities now before we get to a point where change is no longer an option. Where our freedoms will only exist in dreams.
We must stand up and discover a way to fight back.