Overstatement? Maybe — or maybe it’s just early. Opposing gay marriage — opposing gay anything-legal, much less anything admirable, like wanting to make a life-long romantic commitment — is bigotry. Enshrining bigotry in law is apartheid: legal, institutional bigotry. No different than the early days of the Nazi regime — or Jim Crow — when bigotry, which is mere stupidity, was justified by appeals to Terdishin and Scrupshur.
And what about Scrupshur? What about basing any moral decision, much less any public policy, on an appeal to ancient cult ravings? It would be beneath contempt — if it weren’t the majority opinion of North Carolinians. It’s clearly insane and stupid — but not to the majority of Amurkins. No, the majority of Amurkins believe in angels and demons and, not understanding science, dislike science. And this too recalls the Jim-Crow South and Nazi Germany: cultures in which religious magical thinking gave way all too easily, as of course it must, to baser and more compelling magical thinking, e.g. animalistic us-vs-them bigotry.
It ain’t right how them quars do! And they wants to make us all der lak them. They wants our kids to der it! Moogoo the rain god says it’s a sin. He’ll bring plague and famine on us for our evil ways.
Step one: a culture embraces religion, taboo and similar cave-man crap. Step two: freely irrational, it justifies various base perversions. Step three: it institutionalizes these base perversions in its social contract. Step three is apartheid. Step four? There is no step four. Step four is simply seeing how far said culture will carry their apartheid until their the culture dies or is out-competed or destroyed by less base, less vile, less animalistic cultures. This is what Bill Clinton was trying to tell NC with his much more polite warning that passing this law would drive smart, progressive entrepreneurs away from the state. In the long run, if the insane religious bigots continue to have their way in this country, it’ll do that and much, much worse. If it continues, the US will end up like Iran: a former empire collapsed into a theocratic failed state.
