Legalize Gay Marriage (and Everything Else)

5:40 PM Marcellino DAmbrosio 0 Comments

Legalize Gay Marriage (and Everything Else)

I've thought a lot about this issue. As a Catholic that loves the truth and the whole of truth of Church moral teaching, I really want to call this out for what it is. The Church's sexual teaching is moral teaching. It is NOT political teaching. That means that the awesomeness of Catholic sexual teaching is for us to live out on an individual basis. I could write a whole post on this subject, but I've got other things I'd rather say. I will say this though, for you fellow Catholics reading this post, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Agustin both thought there were grounds for legal prostitution. 

WHAT?

Their argument went like this: Human government should be like Divine government. God is good, but he allows evil that he could prevent. He does this because he knows that if he did prevent these evils, greater goods would be forfeited or greater evils would ensue.1 I'll let you guys work out weather or not this principle applies to gay marriage. I have another angle I'd like to approach this from.

Lets start this way: What is the difference between two random kids putting “married” up as their facebook status as a joke, and two guys going into The Church of Divine Tolerance and Diversity and coming out calling themselves married? What is the difference, really? You can believe that they are married, or you can not believe that they are married. Who is to say they aren't? If you are a traditional marriage supporter, you're answer: The state. 

So pretty much this guy

How States work: States make laws, then they enforce those laws with guns. 
Seriously. At the end of every law, there is a gun.

So what you are looking for the state to do, then, is to make it illegal for people to call themselves married. Then they will enforce those laws with coercive force (ie guns). Since the state is usually a very cumbersom entity, it's not unreasonable to assume that the state will have a very difficult time telling the sacramental difference between a man and a woman who've properly gone through pre cana and done all their marriage counseling and a man and woman who just file their taxes jointly for the tax credits. We'll expect to have lots of arrests. 

So ask yourself, do you really want some sort of police force running around and arresting your next door neighbors for calling themselves married, or throwing kids behind bars for a joke on their facebook relationship? Do you really want a special marriage police task force that has access to all your emails and sifts through them for words like “fabulous, and super cute?” No. No one wants that. Traditional marriage supporters,what is it, practically, that you want, then? Because everything I've heard on the topic has gone like this: “marriage and the family needs to be protected and supported by the state.” Can I ask why you think that? Because quite frankly, I think marriage needs protection FROM the state just like EVERYTHING ELSE DOES. 

And also from Nickleback

So what sort of rights do you get when you get married? 
You get TAX CREDITS! Oh the joy of tax credits. You also get the right to be INSURED TOGETHER! What absolute BLISS! From what I've gathered from talking with people, no one really cares THAT much about these things being given to gay people what with civil unions and all. Its the WORD “marriage” that we care so much about. 

So lets just remember. The state enforces all its laws with guns. So when we say something like, we want weed to be illegal, we are saying that we want you dead if you disobey this command. This may seem a little extreme, but this is in effect what we are saying when we say that we want something to be illegal. It starts with fines, you might get a ticket, and that's not that extreme right? Well if you don't pay it, then they will try to take you to prison. If you refuse to go to prison, then you will be shot. Shooting is always down towards the end of that government force line somewhere. 


"We don't want anyone to get shot here, we just want to protect our kids from the gay agenda," you say, " we don't want our kids being forced to learn about sex and gender issues in kindergarten and stuff. We want to keep our adoption agencies open, our churches open, and we don't want to get sued for hate crimes when not wearing pink on gay pride day." I understand, this sentiment. I too am worried about that, but let me ask you this: who is it that's going to come into our communities and say, “your kids will learn that its normal to have two daddies”? Who is it that's going to march into our charities and tell us “If you don't give babies to whoever we tell you to, we're going to close you down”? Who is it that is going pass a mandate to our churches saying, “you will perform marriages for whoever we tell you”? Is it gay people? Or is it the state? 

The problem, my friends is the state. It is a state that has the ability to say “I don't care what you believe, you will do what I tell you or else you will be subject to fines, imprisonment, and death if you resist.” In this country, the government is involved in every single facet of our lives. It reads our emails, it listens to our phone calls, it raises our children, it tells us what food to eat, what substances to put in our body, and who we can and can't call our spouse. Remove the state from the equation, and we no longer need to be on the defensive here.




Let's all try and agree on something. Gay rights activists and traditional marriage supporters. Lets start from the ground up. Individuals have rights. Not groups. There is no such thing as woman’s rights, black rights, or gay rights.  Governments don't have rights, businesses don't have rights. Individuals have rights because we are created and endowed with these equal rights by our creator. Right? Moreover, we ether all have the same rights, or rights don't exist. We have a word for when some people have special privileged “rights” because they are part of some special group. That word is “inequality.” So, for example, when married people get special government privileges that non married people don't have, we can safely say that that is called inequality. 

WHAAAAT!

One of the most core rights that we have as individuals is to enter into economic contract with other individuals. So if two people decide that they want to pool together their resources, get insurance together, and file taxes jointly, what business is that of yours? The answer is none. It is not your business. And if they chose to write the word “marriage,” at the top of that contract, though you disagree, what harm is there in that for you?  

But marriage needs to be supported, you say, we have hard enough time as it is, we NEED  those tax breaks. Well then, the enemy is the government that keeps stealing so much of our money that we need special tax breaks just to survive, not the gay couple living in a house by the street. The government is the problem here, not the answer. They are not the answer to this marriage issue for any of us. Get the government out of education, out of insurance, out of morality, and we no longer have to worry about being fined, imprisoned, or killed for living life the way we believe is best.

For those of you gay marriage activists reading this blog post, if you agree with me that its a bad thing for the state to walk around with guns telling gay people to shut the hell up about wanting to get married, then lets agree on something else. Double standards suck. If Catholics shouldn't use the government to tell you what to do, then don't use the government to tell us what to do. If we believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, then don't come into our churches with guns and tell us that we have to perform gay marriages. Don't use the government to force adoption agencies to give you kids. Go find an adoption agency that will give you kids. They exist. Don't try and get the guy next to you at work fired (by threatening a lawsuit) because he doesn't think he should have to wear a rainbow flag pin on gay pride day. Don't use the government to force parents out of educating their children. If YOU get to live the way you believe is right, then let other people do the same. 

Let me tie this back up. God is the good the true and the beautiful. He hates sin because it is bad for us and makes our lives suck. But he never, ever forces people to be good. He never forces people to follow him or to accept him. Sometimes I hear people tell me that Jesus was a socialist because he told his followers to give their possessions to the poor. He wasn't a socialist. He wasn't a socialist because he didn't hold a gun up to anyone's head to force them to obey. Jesus was not a huge fan of aggressive force. As a matter of fact, he told Peter not even to use defensive force when men came to arrest him. He told Peter “those that live by the sword die by the sword.”  (Matthew 26:52)

So lets put the sword of government down, for truly I say unto you, we will all die by it if we don't. 




1

Stop the Gang Violence!

4:34 PM Marcellino DAmbrosio 0 Comments

“Somebody said ‘why don’t we get a third party?’ and another one said, I think correctly so, ‘Why don’t we get a second party?’” - Ron Paul




Why THIS CRAP is not helpful:



AND ALSO THIS CRAP IS NOT HELPFUL:


I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO SAY A SINGLE THING ELSE.
But I will.

We stereotype each other to death in this country, and it's retarded. But that's not the point that I'm trying to make. I have a more ground shattering thought to share. So here goes. We hate each other kind of like the Capulet's and the Montague's. We hate each other like Wearwolves and Vampires. We hate each other kind of like the Bloods and the Crips. At the end of the day, we hate each other just..... because. Because we're supposed to. Because we always have. Because our supreme loyalty is not to ideological ideals, but to a PARTY.

I remember in 2003 when George Bush started to beat the war drums and we invaded Iraq, I knew that the war must be just. It had to be. It had to be the right move for America because George Bush was a republican, and damnit, the democrats, who opposed it, were my sworn enemies. They were just a bunch of pacifist ninnies.



I supported the war because my party supported the war. I read all of the things that my party told me to read, and I believed them because WE were the good guys, and the democrats were the bad guys. I had a bad feeling about it, a sort of sinking feeling in my gut that there was something fishy going on, but thank the state, my loyalty to my gang came before rational thought. I carried on supporting George W. and everything he did.

SO, my friends, how many of you start all of your political reasoning with that same sort of “which gang am I in?” mentality? My friend JP's recent FB poll (trust me it was totally scientific) discovered that 95% of Americans actually share the common core political guiding philosophy of "if My Side does it, it's okay. If the Other Side does it, it's bad."I read so many articles about the government shutdown that said things like “did the tea party win?” or “we won!” Who the hell is we? Lets just take a second and think about this, k?
What do democrat politicians and republican politicians actually disagree on in Washington? Social issues? Maybe, but most of the time they change their views depending on whats popular. Economic issues? Not really different, they all kind of like government intervention and fiat money. How about foreign policy? They both love war as long as their president was the one to start it. Big Business and Corporate interests? The BEST. Crony Capitalism? Check. The surveillance state? Check.
Lets just take Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, a couple of the golden boys of the two parties and compare them.
A few of their campaign contributors:

Now if you hadn't drawn all the necessary conclusions, here's another comparison chart:





It kind of looks like both dudes got a lot of money from the same places (big banks). But surely that doesn't mean they are going to agree on everything except funding PBS, right?

How about Obama and Romney on personal freedom? They probably disagree..... or not. Before signing the National Defense Authorization Act, Obama requested a provision be added that the president be given the authority to detain American citizens on American soil without a trial. How does Romney feel about that?

PRETTY GOOD! SCREW THE BILL OF RIGHTS!

Guess who started the ball rolling on this whole government spying shindig? Everyone's favorite pseudo dictator, George W. Bush. If you are a republican, you profess to think that big government is bad, that Obama is a tyrant, and that pretty soon we're going to be living in a tyranny run by socialists. It's too bad all of the people you elect are kind of cool with tyranny as long as they are the ones holding the reigns. If you are a Democrat, on the other hand, you profess to hate American imperialism and want our freedom of privacy protected. Why is it, then, that all the people you vote into office don't share your conviction? The house, the senate, the party leadership, the president... all of them supported the NDAA and the Patriot act.

Not only do both parties (in practice) support government tyranny at home, they both support imperialism and intervention abroad. Earlier this year when Obama was set on going to war with Syria, it was a bipartisan house that supported him. McCain, Lindsey, and Bohner teamed up with Pelosi and were all ready to play the “its not really war” game with Assad in Syria. Here's a great quote from Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican on this exact topic: “People are astonished that President Obama is doing many of the things that President Bush did, I’m not astonished. I congratulate him for having the good judgment to understand we’re at war.”

pictured above: "them"

Both parties also supported the bank bailouts of 2008. Yeah! Remember the Wall Street bailouts that started under George Bush? That was all bipartisan supported. Both parties voted to tax us and then pay for Wall Street's mistakes with our taxes. That whole “democrats stand up for the little man,” and “republicans are against government intervention in the economy,” is total poppycock. We are not living in a democracy any more. In a democracy you have choices. You have OPTIONS. In America, we have one option, and that option is the 1%.

As Ron Paul said in his farewell address to congress, "One side doesn't give up one penny on military spending, the other side doesn't give up one penny on welfare spending. Both sides support the bailouts and the subsidies for the banking and corporate elite, and the spending continues as the economy weakens and we spiral down further and further." Those are the facts of the situation. Stop blaming the tea party, stop blaming the bleeding heart liberals. If you were a democrat before, stop calling the tea party "them." If you were a republican before, stop calling people like Mitt Romney and Senator Lindsey "Us."  And the next time you think about posting that meme that shows how all democrats are potsmoking bums or how everyone in the tea party belongs to the klan, do us all a favor and don't.

We, the normal people, all hate to see special interests use the government as leverage to destroy their competition. As it turns out, the tea party and Occupy Wall Street movements were born from the same parents, Wall Street and Washington.




Yeah. Turns out we were on the same side all along. So lets stop fighting each other and start fighting the establishment. THEY are the "them." Not the dude with the coexist bumper sticker or the "don't tread on me" flag. THEY are.