Major NH Newspaper Endorses Marriage Equality

The Concord Monitor published an editorial today ("Don't Tamper With Same-Sex Marriage Law") pointedly demolishing the ridiculous arguments that conservative Republicans in the state have been making to bolster their drive to legislatively repeal New Hampshire's marriage equality law despite the fact that vast majorities of state residents oppose their efforts in published polls.

• Marriage is between one man and one woman. This is more of a declaration than an actual argument. In fact, it's a declaration of bigotry. After all, who gets to define marriage? Those already married? Without a compelling reason to deny marriage to gay people, a statement like this is hard to take seriously.

• But marriage has been restricted to heterosexuals for thousands of years. Many traditions outlive their usefulness. Slavery was an ancient practice too, after all. So was barring women from participation in politics. Once upon a time, people with disabilities were routinely locked away in institutions. Mercifully, times change.

• Marriage is for procreation. In many cases, yes. But infertile, straight couples marry all the time. So do those uninterested in having kids. Those past their child-bearing years aren't forced to divorce. Having children isn't the only thing that brings couples together.

• Same-sex couples don't do as good a job raising children. There are all sorts of good parents and, alas, a wide variety of bad ones, too. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with it. Nor is there a legislative push to ban other sorts of truly bad parents - child molesters, bank robbers - from marrying. No doubt each of New Hampshire's 424 legislators has among his or her constituents gay couples raising children just fine. Examples that disprove this worry are easy to find.

• Same-sex marriage will start us down a slippery slope toward legalized polygamy and incest. No sign of this so far - in New Hampshire or in the places where gay marriage has a longer history. This is simply a scare tactic. In the off chance that they are actually presented with legislation proposing such notions, lawmakers could simply vote no.

• Gay relationships are immoral. Some religions do preach that. But lawmakers must represent all their constituents, not just those who share their religious beliefs. And they must not impose their own religious beliefs on their constituents. Freedom from religion is just as important as the freedom of religion.

• Same-sex marriage threatens the institution of marriage. In fact, encouraging marriage simply . . . encourages marriage. Hard to see how the gay marriage next-door threatens the straight marriage under your roof. Hard to imagine that the legalization of gay marriage is dissuading straight people from getting married or encouraging them to split up.

It should be fascinating that the two states to vote in the Presidential primary (New Hampshire and Iowa) both already have marriage equality. Hopefully this fact and the Republican candidates and the mainstream media will intersect at some point.

Hat/tip to TowleRoad.

Godless Wednesday: NYT Covers Black Irreligiosity

Praise Allah! No less an important media outlet than the New York Times has recognized that African American Atheists exist! SentientMeat brought this article to my attention and suggested it would be a good subject for a Godless Wednesday post. He reads more things than Cactus and Succulent websites after all.

In a piece published this week titled "The Unbelievers" the Paper of Record examines the (ir)religiosity of Black people in this country:

RONNELLE ADAMS came out to his mother twice, first about his homosexuality, then about his atheism.

“My mother is very devout,” said Mr. Adams, 30, a Washington resident who has published an atheist children’s book, “Aching and Praying,” but who in high school considered becoming a Baptist preacher. “She started telling me her issues with homosexuality, which were, of course, Biblical,” he said. “ ‘I just don’t care what the Bible says about that,’ I told her, and she asked why. ‘I don’t believe that stuff anymore.’ It got silent. She was distraught. She told me she was more bothered by that than the revelation I was gay.”

[...]

African-Americans are remarkably religious even for a country known for its faithfulness, as the United States is. According to the Pew Forum 2008 United States Religious Landscape Survey, 88 percent of African-Americans believe in God with absolute certainty, compared with 71 percent of the total population, with more than half attending religious services at least once a week.

[...]

According to Pew, the vast majority of atheists and agnostics are white, including the authors Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

Seeking a public intellectual of their own, some black atheists have claimed the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, interpreting his arguments against teaching intelligent design in the classroom to be an endorsement of atheism. But Dr. deGrasse Tyson is loath to be associated with any part of the movement. When contacted last week by e-mail, he noted a Twitter exchange he had in August, in which he told a follower, “Am I an Atheist, you ask? Labels are mentally lazy ways by which people assert they know you without knowing you.”

Methinks Dr. Tyson doth protest too much, don't you? Anyway, it's cool that there are blogs like Godless and Black and Words of Wrath as well as organizations like African Americans for Humanism and facebook pages like Black Atheists of America. Hopefully MadProfessah's Godless Wednesday will join this list of Black Atheist resources.

The Double Closet: Homosexuality and Immigration Status

Jose Antonio Vargas is an openly gay, award-winning journalist who
 came out as an undocumented immigrant in the New York Times today

An absolutely stunning admission, made by Jose Antonio Vargas in a beautifully written op-ed editorial published today in The New York Times: he is an undocumented immigrant.

Here's an excerpt:

I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it.

I’ve tried. Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream.

But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.

Last year I read about four students who walked from Miami to Washington to lobby for the Dream Act, a nearly decade-old immigration bill that would provide a path to legal permanent residency for young people who have been educated in this country. At the risk of deportation — the Obama administration has deported almost 800,000 people in the last two years — they are speaking out. Their courage has inspired me.

There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.

It really is a must-read about what I call "the double closet," the experience of gay immigrants. Go read it now!