Opposite Extremes: Discrimination in America still exists

By Tina Ray
Opinion Editor

Throughout the history of this country, there have been forms of discrimination:

· discrimination based on religion.
· discrimination based on gender.
· discrimination based on race.

America was just as wrong to plant her feet in the quicksand of religious oppression, anti-women rights, and racial discrimination as she is to plant those same feet in the quicksand of discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Today, the disgrace of discriminating against gay people is also based upon misdirected Bible scriptures and morality.

Given that argument, I firmly believe that America is a nation that practices what I call “selective obedience” to the scriptures.

The same scriptures we use to hurl hatred and judgment against people based on sexual preference is the same scripture taken from the Bible that says, “If thou eye offend thee, pluck it out.”

We, as a nation, cannot selectively choose to follow the mandates of scripture while we vehemently violate the rights of certain people.

The Bible also unequivocally says, “Judge not lest ye be judged.”

There should be, as America legally maintains, a separation of church and state. To institute a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriages violates the mandate that America so zealously enforces for that separation. Government has less business interfering in the private sexual lives of some adults than it had in the Prohibition Law that was passed as a Constitutional amendment and later repealed.

Marriage as defined by the Defense of Marriage Act is a legal union between a man and a woman and is in effect across America. DOMA was passed as a direct result of Hawaii’s pioneering initiative to recognize gay marriages. In spite of the Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause, which stipulates that all states must recognize “acts, records and proceedings” of all other states, same sex marriages are in jeopardy of disappearing.

It wasn’t many years ago that interracial marriages were prohibited by the government and this is the same vain attempt to derail marriages outside of society’s mores and norms.

Notwithstanding, marriage as an institution cannot be defined only by the gender of those participating. The level of commitment that one brings to the ceremony must also define it.

In its most basic concept, marriage is a union of two people. Whether it is a union of two individuals of the same sex, no one has the right to dictate the parameters of that union based upon gender.

In San Francisco or in Pembroke, if two adult gay people choose to marry, they should do so without interference from a nation that has a repugnant history of getting individual rights wrong.