Tuesday, October 29, 2013

A Question of Human Rights. By Eric Smith

To put the current LGBT debate in proper perspective, a person who is born gay has no more idea as to what it is to love a person of the opposite sex than we heterosexuals have of what it is to love a person of the same sex. It just so just happens that for whatever rhyme or reason it is heterosexuals who have gotten to make the rules when comes to determining what is love and who should and who should not marry whom. That doesn't make the heterosexual way of doing things any better. It is just a different perspective, that's all.

People are entitled to be opposed to the gay lifestyle. They are entitled to feel that marriage should only be between a man and woman and to use their religious beliefs as a justification for having such a position. Yet that is where the thing stops for while we have the right to belief as we wish on these matters, we do not have the right to use our beliefs as a justification to impose them on others.

We as heterosexuals do not have the right to tell the LGBT community that their love is invalid, that they can't marry the person of their choice, and should be condemned for a lifestyle and world view that is no more their choice than the lifestyle and world views we have as heterosexuals for in the end we are not dealing with LGBT rights or heterosexual rights; we are dealing with human rights, period.

A case can be made that homosexual behavior is a matter of choice. Well the same can be said for heterosexual behavior as well. We can come up with any kind of argument to de-legitimize or denigrate any kind of lifestyle or life choices that we personally find offensive but that doesn't make us right.

Now some will compare the LGBT lifestyle to that of people marrying an animal, a man marrying a boy, and a woman marrying a little girl. This kind of reasoning, if you wish to call it that, is not only flat out wrong, it is pure garbage. Why, because the animal and the child have no choice in the thing. In these matters the acts of love & marriage are not matters of choice, but acts of force; they are imposed by the human/adult and that negates the whole idea of love & marriage itself for love & marriage is grounded on mutual respect, mutual consent, and an understanding of both the two adult parties involved.

Again such is not possible when one discusses love & marriage between a human being and an animal or an adult and a child for neither the animal nor the child understands the true meaning of love & marriage and therefore by lacking this understanding it is not possible for either to give their informed consent to the actions in question and that is why comparing LGBT love & marriage to this is so fundamentally wrong for in the case of LGBT love & marriage we are talking about actions taken by two consenting adults and therefore that makes their actions & justifications for their actions identical to those of us heterosexuals in every way save the gender of their partners.

So again it all comes down to simple human rights; the fundamental right of two consenting adults to love and marry the person of their choice. The respective gender of the couples involved is completely irrelevant and if we find the image of a man kissing a man or a woman kissing a woman personally offensive then fine; we have the right to turn away but we do not have the right to try to stop them; we have no right to stop them whatsoever regardless of our personal beliefs or convictions to the contrary since it is their lives in question are not ours and thus how they choose to live their lives & with whom is none of our business. Let me repeat, the LGBT community has the exact same right as we heterosexuals do to live their lives however they see fit and to love and marry the person of their choice. In the end it is as simple as that.

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