Friday, April 17, 2009

Using your morality as an excuse not to do your job

The recent Supreme Court decision in Iowa, which recognized that denying people the legal rights associated with marriage is unconstitutional, has brought forth an issue that is one of my biggest annoyances. Mostly in small communities around Iowa, county recorders are using their personal religious objections to gay marriage as an excuse not to do their jobs on April 27th, when the state will begin recognizing same-sex unions. The article suggests that gay marriage opponents have been attempting to influence recorders to refuse to file paperwork on behalf of gay couples as an act of civil disobedience.

The idea that you can abandon certain job responsibilities that you feel are against your moral code is not a new one. Medical professionals don't have to perform abortions, if they choose not to. The problem with this type of exception in the case of gay marriages is that it's essentially based on discrimination. The county recorders apparently have no problem marrying straight couples who have a 50% likelihood of remaining married after 5 years. Gay people, however, do not deserve the same protections spouses receive legally, apparently.

I think there's a huge difference between marriage for legal purposes and marriage in your church. If your church wants to deny gay people the right to be married there, I'm fine with them keeping their hypocrisy and "sanctity of marriage" crap to themselves. The idea that straight people uniformly respect the institution of marriage is laughable, but if you also happen to believe that Zombie Jesus came back from the dead for your sins, believing that straight people have respected the sanctity of marriage really isn't that big of a stretch.

Legal marriage is a whole other ballgame. To say that because your church doesn't agree with gay people getting married, that your state shouldn't let them is using your own distorted morality to dictate what people who may or may not believe the same thing can do. And if you tell me our forefathers were Christian one more time, I'm going to slap you upside the head with a history book. They were deists, who wanted anything but religions running the government. Look it up.

As for the recorders in Iowa, I hope anyone who denies gay people the right to be legally married gets fired. Why should gay people have to pay taxes to support the salaries of people who won't do their jobs and want to deny them rights?

3 comments:

warm_machine said...

I couldn't agree more.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps you need the history book treatment. Our founding fathers wanted to chose their own way to worship. Your assertion that they were not Christian is wrong on different levels. The most annoying is your talent for pontificating to those ignorant enough to believe you.

Ryan the Angry Midget said...

Anonymous comments: When you want to make a point without having to stand behind it.

Here's a little history lesson for you. The founding fathers were deists, as I indicated in my post. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
Read the section on Deism in the United States and you'll find that many of our founding fathers don't believe in the supernatural "Jesus is magic" crap that Christians use to discriminate against their fellow man today. I'm not saying they weren't Christian. I am saying that their version of Christianity was based on reason and much more compatible with rational thought than most current versions. You should try reading about history, instead of just believing what you hear on Sundays.