Nowadays, ghastly homophobic assholes will often go to extreme lengths to make their homophobia seem progressive. They want you to think that they embrace (but not in no “gay” way, dagnabbit) a kinder, gentler sort of homophobia, the kind of homophobia you could take home to meet the parents or take ice skating with the children. Of course, as a result of this, what you’ll frequently find is that these blustering monsters do not refer to themselves by appropriately descriptive monikers like “assholish fuckholes” or “brain-dead cock monkeys” or “retards who uncritically accept religious dogma as authoritative so long as it doesn’t interfer with their ability to eat at Red Lobster or wear clothes of mixed materials and fabrics”. Instead, they usually brand themselves with appellations involving words like “family” and “freedom”, even as they ironically remove social freedoms from gays and prevent them from forming families or caring for children. Apparently the trend in this movement is to brand yourself with a word or phrase that is so inappropriate that it is actually the complete opposite of what you stand for. I can only imagine what would happen if these people were to form a pig-fucking society; they’d probably call it the “Concerned Families for Engaging in Purely Platonic Relationships with Swine Foundation.” And you gotta admit, that’s a pretty catchy name for a foundation. But even though our society seems to be trending more and more towards the overmedicated dystopia inundated with advertising one finds in the novel Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984 nevertheless perfectly predicted the abuses of language by these forces of evil, for freedom truly has become slavery for these incompetent fucks who think they are somehow upholding personal liberties by expressly denying them to gays. You’d almost think the gays were picketing to enforce mandatory gay anal sex and salad-tossing given the incessant misuse of the word “freedom” by these homophobes.

Of course, perhaps the most notorious antigay group does not contain “freedom” in its title. It does contain the word “family”, though. And Dobson’s Focus on the Family could just as easily have been called “Focus on Family Freedom” or “Free Families Protection Agency” or “Free Families from the Ever-Present Gay Oppression of Heterosexual’s Rights to Not Have to See Gay People Holding Hands or Kissing in Public Because That’s Totally Gross Foundation”. Perhaps Dobson’s most potent weapon in the fight against homosexuality is the out of context quote mining of various relatively unknown social scientists implying that the presence of a father and a mother is necessary for a child to grow up without becoming a rapist or murderer. That is, Focus on the Family uses the argument from pseudoscience, which is quite popular among the right-wing. The bulk of his arguments seem to imply that, should gays raise children, the children would become so corrupted by the sight of people with similar genitalia snuggling each other that they would immediately blow up the entire world in amoral ecstasy and utterly destroy the “fabric of America”, which is apparently weaved straight from two-parent households of a man and a wife with 2.5 children and a dog. The overlying message is that Focus on the Family is not made up of bigoted twats; no, they’re just giving you the cold, hard, scientific FACTS! Of course, countless children have grown up without representatives of both sexes in their lives owing to increasing rates of divorce and single-parent households. I myself am a product of such a household. And even though I was raised solely by my mother, I did not grow up to be a thief, have only murderered on a few occasions (but it was necessary because they were working on the Sabbath), and only rarely beat up puppies. What you really find with Focus on the Family is not any sort of interest in facts, but instead a desperate attempt to mold reality to some sort of twisted, distorted conservative view of reality where gays destroy children and cause muslims to take over America.

You also have folk like Mike Huckabee, who you may remember from the previous election cycle and who ran for the Republican Presidential nomination. You have folk like Rick Warren, who you may remember from his best-selling book “The Purpose-Driven Life” and from his characteristically good-natured jowls. These are the homophobic fucktards who mostly succeed in masking their hatred of gays with semantic games, linguistic fluff, and in the case of Warren, odious grins and baby-faced wide-eyed stares of innocence that one simply finds impossible to condemn. The man could call your mother a dirty whore, but a look at that sweet, cherub-like face and you’ll forgive him and even find yourself convinced that maybe your mother IS a whore. But the fragrance that best hides the stench of bigotry wafting from the dog-shit arguments against gay marriage is the pre-eminent argument from “traditional definitions”. It goes something like this:

“Hey gay dudes, I totally respect you and have nothing against you buggering each other in the ass or anything, but I just don’t think you should get married. It isn’t because I hate you or find you disgusting, repulsive, vile, evil, and a stain upon society that will ultimately corrupt it and cause Jesus to return on a fiery cloud to smite you into dust. No, it’s just because the word ‘marriage’ just means ‘union between a man and a woman’. So you see, I don’t hate you, I just don’t want to misuse the word ‘marriage’ and apply it to two dudes buggering each other, just like I wouldn’t want to misuse the word ‘giant red-assed babboon’ by applying it to small children!”

So basically, the homophobe is trying to portray himself as the protector of language and tradition! And in a country obsessed with the deterioration of English and the influx of Spanish-speaking individuals, this certainly hits home. This is just a semantic issue!

But if this is just a semantic issue, then why is it such a big deal for both parties involved? If this would pragmatically change NOTHING but how the word is used, why does it matter? Naturally, the homophobic nitwi…err, pro-traditional marriage folk…are out to prevent a lot more than the misuse of a word. In an NPR interview from a while ago, for instance, Huckabee refused to answer whether he supports giving gays the same civil liberties as straights. Why’s that, Huckster? Could it be that this ISN’T just an issue of semantics, and that substantially more is involved than the title or word we’d apply to their relationships? What about all the civil rights they should enjoy, from tax credits to visitation rights in hospitals to power of attorney to adoption priveleges to so many other issues?

Technically speaking, if this dispute were actually purely semantic, it would not be so troublesome. If gays would be given the same civil liberties but simply could not label their union a “marriage”, then who cares? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But the problem is that while this would create a situation in which homosexual unions were “separate but equal,” often the realistic result of such a separation is simply to make it easier to render it unequal. How can we be assured gay couples would be given the same access, at the same speed and with the same convenience, to the benefits that straight married couples enjoy? Ultimately, keeping the two groups separate by giving gays civil unions but not marriage would, in an ideal world, be quite fair and fitting, but in a messy reality this would just make it easier to continue discrimination against gays in a society where they already face way too much discrimination.

So to all you mouth-breathing, slime-ball, homophobic bastards out there: You are NOT pro-family. You are NOT protecting society and freedom. And you most certainly are NOT some sort of protector of a fucking traditional definition. (What the fuck does that even mean? The “traditional” marriage in the Old Testament was actually polygamy. Does this mean we should vote for fucking Mitt Romney instead of Huckabee?) You are bigoted fuckwits who stand opposed to freedom, to the creation of families, and to happiness. But worst of all, you are fucking liars. You lie to others when you misrepresent gays as incapable of parenting, as “indoctrinating” children to be gay (as if this is even possible), as sex-crazed maniacs who can’t engage in committed relationships, and as destructive to society. And you lie to yourselves when you say this isn’t about denying people basic social rights and priveleges and try to characterize it as a fucking word game.