A minor jumbled sort of rant on gay marriage

So I re-stumbled upon Keith Olbermann's impassioned speech about gay marriage and Prop 8 due to its inclusion in AfterEllen.com's Top 8 LGBT Political Videos of 2008 list just now... (Check it out, the first vid is an anti-Prop 8 musical starring Jack Black as Jesus.) And on second watch it still resonated so I thought I'd share:



Transcript here.

It seems like the main reason people (and when I say people, I mean religious bigots and deluded conservatives- so a loose definition y'know) do oppose gay marriage is the sheer symbolism of the thing- civil unions are accompanied by most of the same legal entitlements as marriages, right? But "Seperate but equal" is by definition segregationist and therefore just not true, it's a signifier of second-class citizenship. Recognising gay marriages as legally and socially completely equal would mean that the validity of homosexual relationships would have to be taught in schools and accepted everywhere- that they would be recognised as equally good, morally and practically. This is an article on same-sex marriage and equality by Wilkinson & Kitzinger which I've only skim read so far because it's holidays and my brain is disintegrating into melted ice-cream mush, but looks stimulating. Love doesn't discriminate and neither should the law! Oh look, I'm reduced to yelling slogans. That's okay though. It's holidays.

So anyway... Everyone got all het up over the ridiculousness that was Prop 8 last month, in America and around the world, but has anyone noticed that there is relatively no public movement for marriage equality in Australia? Nothing halfway as publicised in the US, so far as I've noticed anyway. Maybe there are just less of us here. I do think that the legalising of same-sex marriages is inevitable, like other human rights advancements that we look back on now and wonder why the fuck it took so long. But what to do in the meantime eh? http://www.australianmarriageequality.com/.

And in other LGBT news, the Pope is an arsehole! Fsk fsk fsk, I am so not into organised religion right now.