Congrats Bears

by Jason Esposito

Check out Mark Grisanti’s Facebook page. He is now in great company, and no longer has to pretend to believe what “bigots” like me believe. (I always knew he was uncomfortable around us Tea Party proles.)

I like the congratulations he has gotten from the New York “Bears” guy on Facebook. Oh, you don’t know what a “Bear” is? It is a gay man who is big and hairy. Some gay men have a fetish for that kind of action, and they form “bear lover clubs” and the like in order to hook up.

See, Grisanti can be a Republican and be considered a cool, hip guy as well. That is, if knowing about husky/hairy man-on-man fetish action is what passes for hip and sophisticated opinion these days.

And by the way, is Grisanti Catholic? While I am pretty sure there will not be a fervent letter-writing campaign to the local Archbishop, it remains the official position of the Church that any Catholic politician who supports gay marriage legislation, especially where they overturn the existing law on traditional marriage, can no longer call themselves Catholic. The Church considers this “gravely immoral” and believes that making gay marriage co-equal with heterosexual marriage is as much a sin as abortion. According to the Church, politicians who don’t understand why, are morally unfit to take communion.

And before anyone thinks Grisanti’s reasoning is all lawyerly and elitist and not the purely cowardly, self-interested decision it was, Be Not Afraid!

I had this debate over and over again in law school. To put it simply, what voting for gay marriage means is that ALL marriage in New York is now considered genderless.

And lest you think that does not matter in the least, I will quote from one of the best articles I ever read on the matter from a law professor written in 2007 in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. (Snooty enough for you?)

In the article headed Gay Marriage and Religious Liberty, Roger Severino, Esq. explains how religious institutions will suffer when the state elevates gay marriage to highly protected constitutional status. He writes:

“The legal definition of marriage does not exist in isolation; changing it alters many areas of the law. For example, the definition of marriage plays an important role in the law of adoption, education, employee benefits, employment discrimination, government contracts and subsidies, taxation, tort law, and trusts and estates. In turn, these legal regimes directly govern the ongoing daily operations of religious organizations of all stripes, including parishes, schools, temples, hospitals, orphanages, retreat centers, soup kitchens, and universities. Moreover, the current law provides little room for non‐uniform definitions of marriage within a state and even across states because of difficult questions like child custody.8 The high stakes reinforce the uncompromising posture of the contending sides…”

“The specific consequences that will likely flow from legalizing same‐sex marriage include both government compulsion of religious institutions to provide financial or other support for same‐sex married couples and government withdrawal of public benefits from those institutions that oppose same‐sex marriage. In other words, wherever religious institutions provide preferential treatment to traditionally married couples, state laws will likely require them to either extend identical benefits to same‐sex married couples or withdraw the benefits altogether. Correspondingly, as courts elevate same‐sex marriage in the hierarchy of constitutional rights, state actors will be induced if not required to treat opposition to same‐sex marriage as “invidious discrimination,” “irrational,” or “motivated by animus.” Thus, religious bodies retaining such “discriminatory” beliefs will be subject to a wide range of legal impediments precisely because their policies reflect those beliefs. In short, governments would be prone to sanction uncooperative religious institutions both directly and indirectly—by imposing outright civil liability and by excluding the institutions from government programs and benefits.

In other words, gay marriage gives gay rights activists a legal weapon to attack any Church that holds to the moral doctrine that homosexuality is a sin. Eventually, it will also give them the right to legally attack any individual who holds similar views and accuse them, with impunity, of hate speech. No greater tool has heretofore been devised to silence Christians and conservatives forever. If calling someone a socialist can be considered “racist” by the loons on the Left, just imagine what conservative ideas they are planning to attack as “homophobic” now that they have the law on their side.

In fact, with marriage now genderless, it is not unimaginable that attempting to promote heterosexual marriage (or even heterosexuality) as normal in some government controlled setting (i.e. schools) will be met with fierce denunciations- if not lawsuits and job loss- by offended professional victims and their guardians.

That’s right. Get ready to learn all about husky/ hairy man-on-man love in the third grade if you insist on reading heterosexual, “breeder” propaganda like Snow White, Cinderella, and Romeo and Juliet to the kiddies. And if you don’t like it, well, say hello to unemployment and be ready to be shunned, because the new world has no place for retrograde thinkers like you.

I hope this is merely an exaggeration, however, I know that one thing is almost certain to come of genderless marriage; conservative Churches are in for it and as happened in New Jersey, Iowa, and Massachusetts, they will be flooded with lawsuits and forced to give up much of the services they once performed.

Thanks again, Mark.