To be fearful is easy. It’s the natural first essential state of non-vertebrates and vertebrates, including and most especially humankind. Fear is the fertile base from which all hate springs. Indeed, all religions depend for their existence on fear; not love — fear.

Consider only that being “religious” in a behavior is to do it without thinking about the behavior; without even knowing why: “He took the same route to the office religiously.”

And it was to the religious inclination that Voltaire referred when he posited, “He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity.”

The Bible Belt in America is an amorphously supposed geography that is the American South, where ostensibly one will find greatest social reliance on the what is within the Bible, as a guide for social norms and behavior.  While that may be a generally accurate supposition, it’s nothing anyone should be the least proud of. The Bible treats lightly or fully endorses to the extent it demands fratricide, polyandry, slavery, infanticide, incest, polygamy, genocide, child abuse, and mass theft and rape as well as other extraordinarily execrably intolerable practices . . . all because God said so.

Recall the story of Abraham, and how God demanded of his loyal servant that he take his only son, Isaac, “and offer him . . . for a burnt offering,” as a test of his abiding, unquestioning loyalty?  

Think — please, just T-H-I-N-K, do not be religiously servile: THINK! — what this really says about God, and about whatever it means to believe and behave admirably. If, as the world’s three most influential religions contend, God is omnipresent, all-powerful, and omniscient, why would God put anyone to such a test, the outcome of which His omniscience knew beforehand the outcome of . . . unless and only because God is not, as claimed, omniscient? An inherent contradiction that cannot be dismissed, ignored, or forgotten.

Would anyone today find innocent a father who murdered a child on the defense that God told him to kill the child, as a “burnt alive” human sacrifice? You ever burned your fingers on the range top? Is there anyone who will in any way not condemn most stridently this horrible, horrible tale of a father and a god who would even consider burning a child alive? Don’t give excuses, give a reason it would be okay.

Or, what about stoning a daughter to death because she was not a virgin on her wedding day? Or stoning a son who supposedly spoke or acted disrespectfully to his father? Or condemning to death someone for any of the many ever-so-minor trespasses defined as capital offenses in the Bible?

Nope. Didn’t think so. In the words of the father (George H. W. Bush), “wouldn’t be prudent.” It wouldn’t be prudent because we, as a society, as a thinking world, consider those commandments in the Bible as the very embodiment and expression of evil itself.

Yet, how can that be? It’s in the Bible! They’re stories of examples to follow, and they are Commandments from God!

But we pick and choose. We pick and choose because we know better about what’s right and what isn’t than what is in the Bible.

Regardless, there is a great proportion in our country that are wielding the Bible like a terrible Gattling gun, to mow down those they hate, those they fear, because they’re “different,” “they’re homosexuals,” and “they” should not be allowed to fully express their love and devotion to another human, via marriage, because “it’s an abomination to God.”

Give me a goddamned break! Read astutely the qualifying word “if”: Whether your god be God or Allah, if He requires the first diminishment of basic human rights on account of any of His human creations expressing their love and devotion for one another, however it is they choose, then that god, be it God or Allah, is a ground-hugging, slithering viper, and all who elect to abide some egregious sanctioning of those others are themselves the most incredibly blind, lying, hypocritical and loathsome in Creation.  

I had to be coerced to see Brokeback Mountain. There is nothing whatsoever about the sight of men engaged in the physical adoration of each other that is not uncomfortable, that is the least pleasing to me. Then again, I feel the same about folks with pink or blue (or, pink and blue) hair, or lip or nose rings, or 17 eyebrow piercings, or a tongue-stud that isn’t discomfiting to me.

And therein is the crux of the matter. My comfort ought never be weighed when it comes to what an individual may or may not do, so long as I am not directly harmed by the behavior. For, tyranny breathes its terrible life whenever a person or group is accorded the right to decide what behaviors another may and may not engage, what rights they may and may not enjoy. Such power is veritably a virulent assault on the human dignity of that targeted person or group, and on us all. 

Proposition 8, on the California ballot this November, seeks to deny to gays/homosexuals, and lesbians the right to wed another of their sexual orientation. The ballot initiative was placed there by folks who would have the rest of us believe it was for religious beliefs. Do they really believe the rest of us are that incredibly stupid? No! they did it out of nothing more elevating than their reptilian fear and the hatred that fear spawned. (See above re cherry-picking the things that are abominations to God.)

Moreover, the energy of these venom-brained serpents built when San Diego’s mayor, Jerry Sanders, recanted his promise to veto the city council motion supporting same-sex marriage. In a news conference, the mayor acknowledged his own daughter was gay, and that he could not in good conscience betray her right to her pursuit of happiness via marriage to whomever she chose. The Prop-8 supporters thereupon claimed the mayor had betrayed them. Ministers and conservatives from around the country denounced the mayor and threw cash into the campaign to make the proposition part of the state constitution.

I wonder. What about Paul’s original clients in Damascus, or the slave traders, after John Newton penned Amazing Grace, were they betrayed, or are these examples of men who found their conscience, and their salvation?

Certainly, those who endorse a prohibition against same-sex marriage are entitled to their opinions. Just remember, however, that segregation based on race; declaring who can ride on the bus and where, and which drinking fountains certain folk can use, and which restrooms, and which lunch counters, and which schools a child might attend, and which kinds of persons an individual could marry — all based on some judgment of racial appropriateness — are also opinions that all are entitled to. They who espouse those rancid notions have their right to do so, but the rest of us have an even greater moral obligation to excoriate them, to denounce them openly and assertively, for whatever invidious presuppositions may be the germinal seeds of those opinions.  

Their claims of reliance on biblical edict will have validity only once they argue just as vehemently for a parent’s right to burn his child alive, because God said so, or for daughters to get their father drunk, in order to have sex with him, or for an impure daughter to be stoned to death . . .  Any holdings otherwise betray the stark truth: It’s all just blind fear and hatred.

— Ed Tubbs

     Thousand Oaks, CA