I went, and...

So I *did* go to the State House last night, and was inside watching on closed-circuit TV when the final vote was taken. Honestly, I think this combined amendment was the second-best thing that could happen (the first-best of course would have been that the whole thing was defeated, and down the tubes for now...) Scott thinks that lots of gay couples will get married starting in May, and by two years from now most folks will have figured out that the sky is NOT falling just because some married couples do not consist of a man and a woman. And the whole thing will become a non-issue. I can only hope...

I was outside for a bit, and had an amusing experience. There was one big ex-frat-boy with a couple of huge anti-gay signs who was heckling the mostly pro-gay crowd. He was especially trying to drown out a rather soft-voiced lesbian who was trying to tell everyone what was going on inside (this was right before the final vote). At first, he could be shut up simply by going "Shhhh!" at him (and given the number of teachers in the crowd, we are very good at going "Shhhhh!"). Later he got more obnoxious, and received a lot of bemused heckling back from various gay guys. (e.g. he'd shout, "YOU'RE ALL GOING TO HELL!" and a bunch of guys would start giggling, and one would say, in a loud and queeny voice, "OH yes, it will definitely be hell with you there, sweetie!")

He eventually took his signs and went over to the street, away from the rest of the crowd. I saw a small woman holding two pro-gay signs move up beside him, and offered to hold one of her signs. The one she gave me said "Another Christian For Same Sex Marriage" . I giggled over this, and told her I was Jewish, and said, "Same God, less Bible!" which she thought was pretty funny. Apparently she is the wife of the pastor of one of the UCC churches. Oh well, some folks would say I am nominally Christian anyway, since my dad is, and my childhood had far more Christianity in it than Judaism. G-d will forgive me one way or the other, if G-d even cares. (I think deguspice was NOT happy with me about this, but we'll just have to agree to disagree. In any case, I think the larger Christian community does need to be reminded that there are a lot of pro-gay Christians out there...)

Last night I poked around at the preservemarriage.com website, mostly because I really need to understand where the other side is coming from. It was pretty depressing, but nothing that I wasn't expecting. I'm still pretty angry at how social science findings are used and misused by these folks, though. And one barely has to scrape the surface to discover that these people mostly wish that we (queers of various stripes) would just *go away*. Our presence complicates their lives tremendously, largely by introducing shades of grey that a fundamentalist world-view is not prepared to handle.

correct link

"The Bible is an empty closet" is the correct link for the Evangelicals Concerned page about biblical verses and homosexuality. EC is an organization of LGBT people whose chosen religion is fundamental/evangelical Christianity. The page includes Old Testament references, so it should be useful for Jews as well.