If gay marriage is legalized in Washington, D. C., then everyone will get AIDS. Bam! Just like that. Move along, nothing to see here, everybody’s dead, especially President Obama, and it’s all his fault for loving homos so much.
That’s the kind of post-apocalyptic (if by apocalypse we mean gays and lesbians legally marrying) hellscape Star Parker attempts to paint in a Nov. 23 opinion piece on Townhall.com.
After laying out D.C.’s abysmally high HIV/AIDS rates, Parker unveils the following: “Amidst this dismal picture, the D.C. City Council, perhaps on the theory that serving up another glass of wine is the way to help a drunk, is scheduled to vote on Dec. 1 to legalize same-sex marriage in America’s capital city.”
In other words, making it legal for two guys to marry each other in D.C. would make HIV/AIDS rates go up. It would also make “our nation’s capital city transform officially into Sodom.”
Hey, you can’t argue with logic like that. Not because it’s sound, but because it would be, to borrow from the ever-so-gay Barney Frank, like trying to argue with a dining-room table. Actually, a table is a pretty useful piece of furniture, so how about something less utilitarian, like an umbrella stand or a curio cabinet filled with knickknacks that your grandkids will sell for next to nothing in a garage sale once you die?
Of course, one could argue that’s not what Parker is saying at all. After all, she begins her piece by pointing out that the “poverty rate of Washington, D.C., almost 20 percent, is one of the highest in the nation. Its child poverty rate is the nation’s highest.”
There’s no question that our nation’s capital is in sad shape. But instead of offering solutions to the problem, Parker blames the gays. She even writes about the Catholic Church’s threat to stop feeding the homeless if gay people are allowed to marry, as if the Church is the victim.
“The Catholic Archdiocese of D.C. announced that legalization of same-sex marriage would make it impossible to continue its relationship with the D.C. government and require termination of the social services it provides to some 68,000 of the city’s poor — including about one-third of its homeless,” Parker writes.
Parker blames D.C.’s council for all of this. In fact, the headline of Parker’s piece as it appears on WashingtonExaminer.com is “D.C. sells out poor for gay marriage.”
Uh, not quite. When the Catholic Church stomped its feet in order to bully the D.C. Council into abiding by the church’s antigay will, the council essentially told it to piss off. And rightfully so. For all Parker’s moaning about the plight of the poor, she seems to have no problem with these very families being used as pawns in the church’s fight against equality for gays and lesbians.
But for Parker, the council’s refusal to roll over means that gay marriage “is more important to them than feeding the poor” and that council is “out of touch with the needs of D.C.’s poor.”
You know who’s out of touch?
People who claim to follow the teachings of Jesus and then say that if two dudes exchange rings, they won’t be able to give starving kids any bread. Even more out of touch is someone who calls such a thing the moral high ground.
D’Anne Witkowski has been gay for pay since 2003. She’s a freelance writer and poet (believe it!). When she’s not taking on the creeps of the world, she reviews rock ’n’ roll shows in Detroit with her twin sister and teaches writing at the University of Michigan.