Political reasons for banning Gay Marriage?

I know that the right wing is trying to use GAY MARRIAGE as the new wedge issue. They've gotten as far as they can, hopefully, with abortion so now they are trying to make Americans freaked about GAY MARRIAGE.

Kansas will probably change their constitution to ban Gay Marriage. Many other states have also done so.

I just don't get it. I can understand appeasing the right for a short time with this but I don't understand how this will work for them very long. This is a new strategy but I don't get the politics of it.

Can anyone explain?

Don't listen to what they're media-blitzing us with on any given day. See what's happening that isn't being reported.

a few cynical people have convinced a bunch of ignorant people they give a damn about something that doesn't affect them in the tiniest way, but that affects others deeply. These people look at gays and think of them as children who need to be regulated, or at the very least, not as complete people worthy of the same rights.

Some people respond in favor of a ban honestly thinking they're saving the world from the decline of western civilization, and others respond just because they know it's mean and that it will hurt someone profoundly.

I have to drive down the same highways and shop in the same stores with otherwise reasonable people who think they should have a say in my life about this most personal issue and it makes me mad mad MAD I tell you!

I don't want them making decisions about my bedroom, my property, or what I can and can't do with my life any more than they want me to make those same decisions about their lives. I don't want to be told I'm merely living a "lifestyle", while they are living real and valid lives. I'm truly sick of other people even THINKING they have a right to make a decision about my life.

Think you've got some unalienable rights, do you?

otherwise I can tell them EXACTLY where they can stuff my worthless American citizenship. My loyalty to America is contingent on America being good to me, and I am not at all "co-dependent" in this regard. While I don't mind fighting the good fight as long as it's feasible, the second it becomes dangerous to me or mine or the moment the fight becomes futile (i.e., FMA is ratified), I am the fuck outta here. Life is too short to throw it away on mental illness.

I'll take my assets and my family and my professional skills to any of a number of countries who have more freedoms and fewer nutcases than America, and I really don't mind paying higher taxes or learning yet another language.

everywhere. Then there will be another wedge issue, don't worry.

They use the political capital from one issue to glide into the next.

The only reason to ban gay marriage is religious! There is NO political argument that is not based in religion! It is discrimination, through and through! It is the ever "oppressed" Christian fascists that want their views imposed on others. Once these laws are passed, they will continue to press for anti-gay measures. They will push as far as they can. Until these assholes can put us on cattle cars, they will not be satisfied!

to justify their hate but this is all about power and politics. It's all about winning for them.

My post is about why they think this will work. I know most Americans are against Gay Marriage (caps are intentional.) I just don't think most worry about it much. I don't believe it's a big issure for most.

I guess I misunderstood your question. "Fags" are 'boogymen' that the right-wing uses to 'scare' its base. And I always find it so interesting that many Americans are against Gay Marriage, yet have no problem with "Who Wants to Marry a Midget?" :eyes:

The 2006 mid-terms are not far away. You gotta have an issue to turn out voters. Such is the nature of wedge issue politics.

but I can't find it now. There is a published study out there which is a long look at the organized anti-gay marriage effort: a long, comprehensive look at what these folks have been telling each other and arguing and using as propaganda.

The finding of the study, to the best of my recall, is that (1), the construction of the Biblical justification is pretty awkward at best, as for all anti-gay dogmatizing, and the stronger authority in political practice amounts to "tradition". But the crux of the matter lies in (2), the literature uniformly projects an image of extremely dysfunctional family life on gay couples and their children, along with a theory that gay people are somehow- by appearing in the media and in suburbia- exposing 'traditional' families to 'values' that are leading to a broad breakdown of "family values". The greatest intensity of the literature in emphasizing this is in the Bible Belt, where divorce rates, spousal abuse issues, moving in together before marriage, premarital sex, and other indicators are highest and perhaps starting to crest.

The conclusion of the study: gay people and gay marriage are being scapegoated for the breakdown of "family values" (read: patriarchal families) by American conservatives and reactionaries in the 'Heartland', which they had previously imagined to be a phenomenon or pathology only of the liberal Coasts.

The true relationship is, of course, correlation: gay people are more visible where people are more Modern, and where people are relatively Modern (aka socially liberal) the patriarchal family goes into breakdown. Any honest family counselling person knows this, but the grieving process for the patriarchal family means the classical Kubler-Ross stages of it- denial, bargaining, bitterness/anger, depression and so on. The anger and denial and sense of violated vanity and resentment at loss of power involved is politically very exploitable, easily harnessed by finding someone who can be argued to be to blame. And gay people are the very visible messengers of social change.

The breakdown of patriarchal family life in the Blue States came earlier- where I am, in New England, the epidemic of divorces and such that is now at something of a peak in the Bible Belt happened here in the late 1970s and early 1980s. People here lashed out against "women's lib" and the feminists with high public profile.

This is a picture of the present condition-
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2004/11/when_the_blue_s.html

and stirrng up their religious right base as well as paying them back.