right-wing myths about marriage and gays

The right-wingers won massive victories in the states in their continued efforts to relegate gays, bi-sexuals, lesbians and the transgendered (hereafter referred to as GBLT) to second-class citizen status. How? As usual through outright lies, distortion, false claims and a reliance on the basic ignorance and fear of the unknown of the majority of rural, middle-class Americans.

Their basic "mythic" arguments:
1. Marriage has been a sacred institution between a man and a woman for the last 5000 years.
2. Allowing GBLTs to marry will ruin or corrupt the institution of marriage.
3. GBLT individuals are evil and against God's will.
4. The GBLT cultures are somehow corrupting our youth and resulting in the decline of "values" in America.

Now, to my mind, any intelligent individual will look at the statements above and say: how could anyone in their right mind hold such bigoted and exclusionary views? Unfortunately, as the last election so soundly reminded us, a lot more people in this country are willing to buy into this vision that we sometimes might care to admit. Now let's debunk all these right-wing myths:

1. Marriage has been a sacred institution between a man and a woman for the last 5000 years:
This is pure drivel. Marriage has evolved and changed over time the same as any other social institution. Some of you may even be old enough to remember when inter-racial marriages were outlawed or when inter-cultural couples were discriminated against openly. Prior to that women in a marriage were merely regarded as chattel that the husband owned. And who can forget that still legal in some cultures practice of polygamy (75% of the worl'd societies allow this form of marriage)! If a tradition is wrong (some more examples: sacrificing virgins to the gods, slavery), it gets changed. An exerpt from the Congressional Quarterly Researcher, 2003:
Present-day advocates of gay marriage — notably, Yale law Professor William Eskridge in his book The Case for Same-Sex Marriage — find historical analogues dating back to the Biblical accounts of David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi. Eskridge notes that same-sex relationships between men were common in ancient Greece — witness Plato's discourse on love in the dialogue Symposium — and that the Roman Emperor Nero had a formal wedding ceremony with his male lover Sporus.
“Same-sex marriages are a commonplace in human history,” Eskridge writes, and have been “tolerated in most societies” except in the West.

2. Allowing GBLTs to marry will ruin or corrupt the institution of marriage:
This has yet to be explained to me? How? How does letting other adults marry of their own volition and using their own ceremony corrupt yours? Besides the fact that, as mentioned above, the idea of a singular "institution of marriage" is simply not true, how does gay marriage in any way affect heterosexual marriage? There is absolutely zero evidence that gay relationships are any less lasting, loving and viable than hetero ones and research about child rearing shows that there is also no difference in the short or long-term outcomes of those children (besides perhaps, and I'm just guessing here, that these children would be more open-minded and tolerant of others).

3. GBLT individuals are evil and against God's will:
And guess what? Right-wingers often believe anyone who doesn't believe exactly what they believe is evil. Here's another similar example: the Al Qaida wackos think that America is evil and against God's will too...

4. The GBLT cultures are somehow corrupting our youth and resulting in the decline of "values" in America.
Wait, I thought they had been crying that TV and those evil hollywood people were responsible for that...Anyways. whose values are we talking about here? There is absolutely no credible evidence of any relationship between a rise in GBLT culture and a decline in values. Besides, gays have existed since mankind arose. It was certainly widespread (and this is well-documented) in the first democracies in history: ancient Greece and Rome (not to mention rampant within the cloistered medieval monasteries).

By the way, here is an excerpt from CRUZ, DAVID B. "Same-Sex Marriage, I." Encyclopedia of the American Constitution. Ed. Leonard W. Levy and Kenneth L. Karst. Vol. 5. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2000. 2307-2308. 6 vols.

The refusal to allow same-sex couples to marry violates the DUE PROCESS clauses of the Fifth Amendment and the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT, under which the Supreme Court has recognized that the right to marry may not be significantly burdened absent extraordinary justification. In LOVING V. VIRGINIA (1967) the Court held that the right to marry is a FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT, and ZABLOCKI V. REDHAIL (1978) made clear that it embraces both negative rights to freedom from government prosecution for cohabiting as married and affirmative rights to enter government-sanctioned civil marriage. The prohibition on two men or two women marrying thus should trigger STRICT SCRUTINY, provided the right is defined at a sufficiently high level of generality.
Defenders of the heterosexual status quo argue that civil marriage has always involved the union of one man with one woman, and thus that there is no SUBSTANTIVE DUE PROCESS right to same-sex marriage "deeply rooted" in American history or "essential" to our scheme of ordered liberty. Yet it is inappropriate to take enduring characteristics of a person claiming a right into account in defining the contours of that right. The Court rejected such an effort in Loving, where Virginia argued that its MISCEGENATION law prohibiting marriages between white and black persons violated no fundamental right because mixed-race marriages had long been prohibited by law. Despite the long history of monoracial statutory marriage definitions, the Court held that Virginia's law infringed the fundamental right to marry.
Similarly, the right to marry should not by fiat and history be deemed to exclude same-sex marriages a priori. Rather, the two-sex requirement should have to survive strict scrutiny to be consistent with the due process clauses. However, in the RIGHT TO DIE case Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), a majority of the Court took a restrictive view of the proper formulation of substantive rights claimed to be protected under the due process clause, and it is conceivable that the Court would do so in this context and find no fundamental right to same-sex marriage.
Nonetheless, excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage also violates the constitutional guarantee of EQUAL PROTECTION OF THE LAWS, which demands that governmental classifications must withstand the appropriate level of scrutiny. Under cases such as UNITED STATES V. VIRGINIA (1996), governmental SEX DISCRIMINATION must survive at least intermediate scrutiny.

There is no reliable social science evidence that most or all mixed-sex marriages provide a healthier child-rearing environment than same-sex marriages.

At base, the nationwide refusal to recognize same-sex marriages, the federal Defense of Marriage Act, its state-level copycat statutes, and arguments that recognizing same-sex marriages would somehow "undermine" the institution of marriage all reflect both a profound anxiety that heterosexual privilege may be eroding and an attempt to use the law to perpetuate the subordinate status of lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons. The Constitution, however, prohibits majorities from using the power of government to shore up such status hierarchies. As the first Justice JOHN MARSHALL HARLAN argued in his DISSENTING OPINION in PLESSY V. FERGUSON (1896), and as reaffirmed in the sexual orientation context in ROMER V. EVANS (1996), the Constitution "neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."