In the uphill battle for marriage equality, gays and lesbians have had to stare down many a disappointing court decision where bias and homophobia masqueraded as law. Granted, marriage equality received a significant boost across the country from the November election, but just in case we were getting too comfortable with good news, Judge Robert C. Jones comes to the rescue.
Jones, a federal district judge appointed by George W. Bush, ruled late last month that Nevada keeping same-sex couples from marrying was totally cool with him. Jones found that the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws was not intended for homos and that the people of Nevada were right to “[maintain] statutes that reserve the institution of civil marriage to one-man-one-woman relationships.”
His reasoning? Why, to save the human race from destruction, of course.
“The perpetuation of the human race depends upon traditional procreation between men and women,” Jones wrote in his ruling, right after he basically said that adoption is for losers. Also, according to Jones, gays and lesbians do not face discrimination, which I guess means that discriminating against them when it comes to marriage equality is no big deal? “Homosexuals have not historically been denied the right to vote, the right to serve on juries or the right to own property,” Jones wrote. Because those are the only areas in which discrimination counts, I guess.
Oh, and Jones says, because gays won a couple of ballot measures in the 2012 election, “it simply cannot be seriously maintained, in light of these and other recent democratic victories, that homosexuals do not have the ability to protect themselves from discrimination through democratic processes such that extraordinary protection from majoritarian processes is appropriate.”
In other words, “Grow a pair, gays. You won a couple rounds of marriage-equality poker, now get lost. Never mind the fact that there are a couple of right-wing nuts waiting for you outside with a baseball bat who will gladly relieve you of your winnings. But hey, as long as not everybody wants to smash your heads in, you’ve got nothing to complain about.”
But, of course, Jones was just thinking about “the family.” And by that I mean heterosexuals, obviously. Everybody knows that same-sex couples are just roommates. Jones wrote in his ruling, “Because the family is the basic societal unit, the state could have validly reasoned that the consequences of altering the traditional definition of civil marriage could be severe.”
Hmm … the state could have reasoned such a thing, but validly? Me thinks not. I’ll use Massachusetts as Exhibit A: Gay folks getting hitched there has not caused the crumbling of the commonwealth.
But I suspect Jones doesn’t pay much mind to the non-destructive results in liberal cesspools that allow same-sex couples to wed. He wrote, “It is conceivable that a meaningful percentage of heterosexual persons would cease to value the civil institution as highly as they previously had and hence enter into it less frequently … because they no longer wish to be associated with the civil institution as redefined.”
Got that? If gays and lesbians can get married, then heterosexuals will say “fuck it” and just live in sin the rest of their lives. What a wise and sound argument. You really can’t argue with logic like that. Because it isn’t logic, it’s lunacy.
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.