I apologize in advance and promise that my next post will
not be a rant, but I have to get this off of my chest. I live in a suburb of
Cleveland. I remember when Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus went missing. I remember
watching the yearly coverage of the vigils. I remember the shock and relief I
felt when they were found alive.
I look at Ariel Castro and I see him for the troubled soul
that he is. I understand that people like him need to be locked away forever in
order to protect the rest of us from falling victim to them. I thought people
from all sides of the political aisle could come together and shake their heads
in mutual disgust at what Castro did to those three women. I foolishly thought
that his actions would stand alone as sick and perverted and so far away from
what normal people do, that there was no comparing him to everyday people.
I should have known better. Our society is built on sound
bites and sensationalism. We beg for it like a dog panting for a bone. We live
to be outraged and offended and insulted and frankly, it irritates the hell out
of me. I can’t remember the last time that I watched a panel on MSNBC, FOX NEWS
or CNN, and I didn’t hear someone say something that I felt was a bit extreme.
We have to tone down the rhetoric because we've gone too far. We jumped
overboard a long time ago and I’m starting to wonder if the ship of human
decency will ever turn around and come back to rescue us from ourselves.
I saw an article about a conservative radio host comparing
LGBT love with Ariel Castro’s demented “love” for his victims. My first thought
was that surely the commentator was misquoted. No rational person would ever
compare a mutual love between consenting adults to a one sided love in which
the unwilling partners were kidnapped, imprisoned, terrorized, beaten, raped,
starved and abused in more ways than can be described in words. How can anyone
even remotely link the two? I can’t fathom the thought process of people so
obsessed with ratings and talking points that they abandon common sense.
So who did this? Well I blame both people who were having
the discussion. Sandy Rios, an American Family Association talk show host and
Fox News Contributor, and Erwin Lutzer. Their
discussion about some Facebook post, became a discussion of the ways in which
love is contorted and sometimes perverted in to something that in no way
resembles love. Lutzer began talking about pedophilia in an attempt to explain
that all love isn’t good and loosely connect it to the idea that same-sex marriage
represents bad love. Anyway, Lutzer said, “A pedophile I’m sure says that he
loves children…but you can see how destructive that love is.” He went on to say
“Once love is undefined as kind of this ‘I want to do this and so I’m loving’
then, of course, we end up where we are ending up today with a great slide in
morality…” Here is where I take a breath to keep from screaming. His argument
upsets me for two reasons: one, it is comparing apples and oranges and two, it
is attributing something to love that love has not done. Let’s address the
first argument. There is a huge difference between the love between two
consenting adults and the love between a consenting adult and a child. Where do
I begin? As a society, we acknowledge the inability of a child to consent or
enter in to agreements. Gone are the days of 12 year old brides (unless you
live in a cult or something). Children cannot have legal relationships with
adults because we realize that children are not the same as adults. Children do
not think the same way as adults. They don’t usually have the foresight to
consider the long term ramifications of their actions. We don’t even trust
children to drive vehicles until they are a certain age. To compare a “relationship”
between an adult and a child to a relationship between two adults is to completely
ignore the fact that one contains two people who can legally enter in to
agreements and one does not. Proponents of same-sex marriage are not looking to
make love “undefined,” they use the same definition as everyone else, only
theirs is gender free. Instead of marriage being a union between one man and
one woman, proponents of same-sex marriage argue that marriage should be a
union of two consenting adults, regardless of gender, but everything else
should stay the same. And for the second part about morality, um, society
started slipping down that slope a long time ago. Sex sales everything, from
shampoo to food to cars. Singers prance around on stage in risqué outfits,
young celebrities are sexualized way before they should be. Wholesome family
entertainment is virtually a thing of the past with few exceptions and that has
little to do with homosexuality and everything to do with the drastic change in
American morality in which things are only immoral if you get caught doing
them.
Now back to the comment that Sandy Rios made about Castro.
Castro was an abuser. His “love” for his victims was, is and always should be
criminal. No one has the right to hold someone against their will and abuse
them. Same-sex marriage is about people willingly committing to each other. If
a gay man came to the Justice of the Peace with his partner bound and gagged in
a cage, the Justice of the Peace would need the partner’s consent before and during
the ceremony. You don’t get to force your “love” on other people who don’t want
it. That’s why there are t-shirts that say “Against Gay Marriage? Don’t Get
One.” A sane gay man doesn’t want to force a straight man to marry him any more
than a sane straight woman wants to force a gay man to marry her. When
proponents of same-sex marriage say that it’s about the right to love, they don’t
mean to love someone who doesn’t love you back, but rather, the right for two
people to love each other and express that commitment through entering in to an
institution that declares their love to the world and gives their relationship
legal protections under the law. Comparing same-sex love to Ariel Castro’s love
reflects poorly on the person making the comparison because it is clearly a
comparison that is made for emotional purposes and not based on any rational
thought.
Can we please stop with the sound bites and outrageous
comments and go back to thinking before we speak?
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