The following is my letter to the Special Righteousness Committee, one of the few groups which opposes gay marriage, and who was written arguments in favor of Measure 36 in the Oregon Voter's Pamphlet.
These people are using the red herring of gay marriage to attempt to distract us from real issues in the world, like the fact that we're fighting an unjust war, or that the New World Order is just around the bend. Gay marriage is certainly an important issue, however, is it not wrong to use rhetoric like "Agree with us or burn in hell!"? (P.78 of the 2004 Oregon voter's Pamphlet).
I suggest anyone who feels this way to write to them, as they have no email I could find.
Noah
October 14, 2004
Dear Special Righteousness Committee,
P.O. Box 1851
Portland, Oregon 97207
I have seen your rhetoric and your Nazi-esque beliefs about 'the other'. I have read M. Dennis Moore's caustic and hateful writings in the Oregon Voter's Pamphlet. If hate is a family value, then by your logic, it is also a religious right to be hateful of other people who don't follow the implicit behavior patterns you people do.
I have a problem with the fact that you people are spreading hate in our community at a time when we need love the most. I can't believe you are spending your TIME and MONEY on these trite issues when there is so much more at stake in this world. You're too blind to see it, unless you just do not care at all. Our republican, religious- righted government claims to be spreading democracy to the Iraqi people by firebombing them with missiles containing expelled uranium. Is this a Godly act on the president's part? President Bush himself claims that he speaks with God on a regular basis and has a running communiqué with The Holy One regarding his actions. This is the same God who, when conquerors in the New World worshipped and prayed to for the extermination of the Native American Person, stood idly by and let it happen. If God truly existed, and was as outraged by this as he was in the so- called Biblical times, he would have let his wrath be tasted once again by the human race. Maybe Jesus is up there with God holding him back?
There are more important things to spend you time and money on. Gay marriage doesn't kill people. Gay marriage doesn't hurt anyone. It doesn't hurt anyone the way expelled uranium in the air hurts, deforms and kills people. Gay marriage doesn't profit from killing people the way the tobacco corporations do. Gay marriage doesn't even hurt people who aren't gay. Gay marriage is just a red herring to keep us distracted from the real issues- the ones that affect the lives of people we'll never even meet. People don't really care about Gay marriage! People care about an impending New World Order. People care about their loved ones going to war for an unjust cause (Iraq has NO WMDs, NO links to Al- Qaeda, and has NEVER attacked America physically or religiously). Some of your most loved Republican bureaucrats even have gay family members, like Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney.
Let me ask you a question: Where will you be when the imperial army steps in to your hometown, under a presidential declaration of martial law, at which time you will be forced to give up your individual rights and assume the subordination of the supreme authority of the government, under the real or fabricated suspicion of an impending attack? When you no longer are an individual in the eyes of a fundamentalist Christian regime, how much will gay marriage mean to you? Probably not a damn thing, because if you don't want to spend the next 50 years living in neo- Nazi America, then you'd better get your fucking eyes opened. That impending attack thing I just asked you about? That was my own paraphrase of a prediction made in the 1970s by Henry Kissinger, a person loved and revered by many Right Wing Christians, including Ronald Reagan.
Look, it doesn't take a genius ex- Christian like me to know for a fact that Jesus never hated anyone except the people who worshipped false idols, like money and power. Jesus never wanted power. Jesus wanted people to be happy and loving to one another, and not to relish in contempt for their differences. We live in a world of falsities. Lincoln did not really free the slaves. Columbus did not really discover America. Bush did not go to war as a last resort, but we're told over and over again that these things are true. We're even being told by YOU that Orwellian logic ought to be embraced! Jesus never would have believed that love is hate, that war is peace.
So this Gay marriage thing, this veil you want to put over our eyes to disguise the truth, to place opacity all around us. It's not going to work. Try saving yourself first. Try listening to others for a change. Because if you believe in Liberty and Justice for all, you'll drop your weapons and turn the other cheek the way Jesus would.
Noah D Richardson
2923 SE Francis #4
Portland, OR 97202