On occasion, I’ve written about the emotional manipulation and lies that Eugene Delgaudio uses in his fundraising emails. Today marks another one of those occasions. I received another email about how he’s helping to fight the good fight to help repeal marriage equality legislation in various states and even fighting to aid the appeal to the Proposition 8 decision if it goes before SCOTUS. It’s all his pretty standard claptrap.
But what really draw my attention and spawned this post is the subject line he chose for this:
Real marriage outlawed
I’m so awestruck by that line, I feel the need to repeat it:
Real marriage outlawed
Okay, let’s ignore the fact that Eugene Delgaudio and his band of merry hate-peddlers don’t actually get to define what marriages are “real” and what ones are “shams” and force that definition on the rest of us. Let’s just for the moment pretend that only marriages between one man and one woman are a “real” and the other marriages (including those of Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon) are cheap knockoffs, presumably being sold by hucksters standing on NYC street corners alongside the hucksters selling Rilex watches and Guxi purses.
That subject line still makes no sense. Nothing has been outlawed. There are no special agents bursting into churches to interrupt man-woman marriages and arrest the priest trying to perform such a thing. The IRS isn’t lining up to audit men who mark “married” on their 1040 and list a woman as their spouse and accuse them of fraud. Newspapers aren’t refusing to print marriage announcements for man-woman couples out of fear of being charged with conspiracy after the fact.
Men and women are still happily getting married to one another and the population at large is freely and happily celebrating those weddings. The idea that such marriages have somehow been “outlawed” is ridiculous to the point of me wondering what color the sky is in Mr. Delgaudio’s world. Because anyone who can write that subject line in any sense of seriousness — and there’s no sense that he’s being ironic or intentionally engaging in hyperbole — is not someone I can picture as living in reality.
Sadly, this kind of bizarre thinking seems to be prevalent among the anti-equality crowd. They are convinced that allowing same sex couples to marry will somehow outlaw or destroy man-woman marriages. To their way of thinking, the peaceful co-existence of same sex marriages as an additional option alongside man-woman marriages simply isn’t possible. This is “us vs. them” thinking at its most extreme.
Some opponents of marriage equality say it’s not about being against gay people. But when most opponents of marriage equality — and gay rights in general — hold this extreme “us vs. them” mentality at the heart of their arguments, it’s nearly impossible to believe that claim. After all, as my mother used to tell me, “Actions speak louder than words.”
