Why do people oppose same-sex marriage?
1) They feel guilty about their own sins, and they feel powerless to bring about change in themselves. So they lash out at easy targets, policing people they’ve never met, who they never will meet, who they know nothing about, who they will never know anything about.
It is a drug; a substitution for their own spiritual growth. Spend all your time screaming at invisible sinners, and you’ll never have to face the sinner inside of you.
2) They have made their choices, and chosen their ways, and they are terrified that they chose wrong. They worry that they’re missing out on something, yet the feel powerless to change. They feel their lives are a prison cell, they can’t leave, so they lash out at people outside the prison cell, trying desparately to make their lives miserable, as a way to prove to themselves that they made the right choice.
3) They’ve simply never met any same-sex couples. They’ve never been forced to confront the reality of the pain that anti-marriage protestors (anti-same-sex-marriage is anti-marriage) cause. If they had even a sense of the hurt they’re causing, they would stop.
Why pro-marriage (i.e. pro-same-sex-marriage) activists will win:
We have skin in the game. We actually have lives being interrupted by this issue, or friends whose lives are being interrupted. Same-sex marriage bans affect how we or people we love can raise our children, visit our loved ones in the hospital, whether people we care about get health care, it affects citizenship status. It matters.
For anti-marriage (anti-same-sex-marriage) activists, they are only driven by fear and self-loathing. Over time, a movement like that can only wane. People lose interest, they get pre-occupied by things that actually make a difference to them: their families, the careers, their homes, their communities.
The anti-marriage movement is getting a lot of extra bouyancy because it is being falsely tied to peoples’ spiritual communities. People feel they need to oppose marriage in order to support their church. And their church is something that really does matter in their lives, even though same-sex marriages really have nothing to do with their church’s ability to provid a spiritual community for them.
But these churches who are draining their resources fighting this battle, giving in to fear and self hatred and self denial… these churches will not grow, because in the end, no one wants to go to a church of fear, of self hatred and of self denial.
And other churches, based on love and support and taking care of yourself and taking care of those around you…. those churches will grow. And the anti-marriage movement will fizzle out.
It already is.
Watch.
And act. Let’s fill ourselves with love. Let’s build strong communities that support love for everyone, and marrige for all who want it. Let’s help build coalitions that support same-sex couples who want to marry. Let’s get out their and shine so brightly and work so hard that the next time there is a prop 8, the next time there is a propsed marriage ban, the next time someone says something bleak and hateful, that there is someone there with a kind word, or a protest sign, or a confrontation, or a clipboard, or an organization, or an army* to back up what is right.
* not the kind with guns, the kind with full hearts.