2004-03-12 - 10:35 a.m.

I got to work early yesterday so I'd have time to go to the State House and check out the people supporting and protesting gay marriage.

Absolutely astonishing. Supporters had red buttons saying that they agreed with the Massachusetts court ruling (which declared barring gay marriages unconstitutional), and has signs reading things like another soccer mom for gay rights and don't mess with MY constitution and so on--all reasonable and well thought out.

Protesters had yellow buttons reading something like one man, one woman, equals marriage.

But their signs were much, much worse. Stuff like AIDS--cure? and For incest, for polygamy, for sodomy. Some of the signs were more tame, but all of them were perplexing. Many of the protesters were clearly bussed in.

One group of black people stood together and held a sign reading marriage existed before "civil rights." You can't change it now. That one was a little confusing to me--why put civil rights in quotation marks? Do you think civil rights are stupid? Another person held a sign reading if the good people don't get up and fight, then evil wins, which, while it was clear that the individual was against gay marriage, could have easily been interpreted as being for gay marriage.

I've mentioned this before, and I'm not going into it again, but here's what I think about this. Protesters? Go home. Don't tell me this is about preserving the sanctity of marriage. Don't tell me you love the sinner but hate the sin. You're all a bunch of idiots who are pissed off that the civil rights movements of the past couple of centuries have severely limited the number of people you're publicly allowed to hate.

If you're not gay, this issue has nothing to do with you, so go home. Go pray. Go hate people in private.

I went back with Caitlin on our lunch break and we were once again amazed by the level of ignorance before us. Normal looking people, carrying such nasty and mean spirited signs. Brainwashed teenagers. We agreed that it's weird--stepping outside our little intellectual bubble--that we just assume that everyone is a reasonably enlightened person and are absolutely amazed when they're not.

One clearly out-of-state woman held a sign reading don't confuse the children or something like that, and I was glad to see that message out in the open--that many of these people are afraid that if children grow up thinking that being gay is not a big deal, then the legacy of hate will not be passed on and then some day there won't be anyone left to hate.

I'm sick of we hate the sin but love the sinner, 'cause that's a lie. No. You hate both.

I don't know. I don't want to go into it. There are thousands of logical arguments I could make, that I could have made, but if you're so bigoted or brainwashed that you're going to head to the State House to show how much you hate a group of people, any argument is wasted on you. Part of me was mad and wishing a riot would break out, so I could have taken out a bunch of ignorant yellow-stickered fucks with my fists. But mainly I just felt sorry for the idiots. I'm sorry that that's your life. I'm sorry that you can live with the fact that Jesus told you to love everyone but that for whatever reason you�re also supposed to hate certain people. I'm sorry that you can live with the fact that you're told to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but that you can't plug in what if I was gay? into that equation and come to the conclusion that if God happened to make you gay, you wouldn't want thousands of people thinking of you as a sinner. I'm sorry that you can't think for yourself.

One bright spot was seeing someone who had gotten frustrated and who had turned his equal rights for everyone sign around to write Yankees Suck on the back--he just wanted to unite everyone.

Also amusing were the trolley tour cars that passed by, full of old ladies presumably from Missouri, who were taking pictures of the action with their Kodak fun-savers.

When we got back to work, I snuck downstairs for a coffee, and there was an SUV with Pennsylvania plates (most likely not from an urban area, such as the city of brotherly love), and it was populated by five or six pretty big looking guys. One of them had a bullhorn and a southern accent, and he was shouting religious, anti-gay things at people. Now, this is well away from the State House--so nobody has to be polite and civil.

And you know what happened? The shitheads got fuck you'd and ultimately laughed out of the area. That's right. So many people launched F-bombs at the fuckers, and so many people just started laughing at the idiots that the asshole stopped shouting through his bullhorn and they drove away.

That made me happy. Maybe in rural Pennsylvania you can get away with bullying people into ignorance, but you have no power in downtown Boston.