Ω A consistent mistake that is crippling the opposition to theocratic fascism is the passive acceptance of their announced goals - the argument from within the context and moral boundaries set up by the fascists themselves.
So that a perfectly reasonable refutation of the abstinence-as-contraception position - that it doesn't work, that it contributes by its failure to the spread of disease and unwanted teenage pregnancies - stands all by itself in the auditorium. There's no one on the other side. They don't care. They've sealed themselves against debate, and won't participate, anymore than a hawk will debate a mouse on the question of vegetarianism. Because the real issues are not being debated. They won't argue the real question. Which is who lives and who dies.
God's judgement is represented as taking place in the afterlife, in the present economy, and in mysterious and seemingly contradictory ways. But the people doing that representation are vitally concerned with the particulars of survival - resources, territory, and social organization. The suffering of innocents, the unfair burdens of inequality, the truncated lives of the uneducated young, they don't care about those things. What they want is a clear line between those who will obey at any cost, and those who won't. And those who won't can bloody well die.
This explains handily how a pro-life position on abortion can co-exist with a rabidly pro-death capital punishment position.
By attacking the hypocrisy of their stance and the absurdity of their statements we play right into the strategem that that noise really is. A means of determining the loyalty of slaves.
It's the same in a broader and more uplifting way with things like weddings, from the civil license to the officiating by a traditional minister, to the reception. It's a submission, by the breeding pair, to the higher authority of the social group, which is in itself a fine and very human thing. We are social animals and we owe our survival to the altruistic behavior of many of our ancestors, who sacrificed their individuality, who gave up their lives, or a part of them, for the larger life of the group.
That there are people who've lost sight of the essentially reproductive character of marriage, seeing only the social contract it also is, is only more proof of that. The social contract is what's most operative now. Even though the religious fascists will speak most vehemently and emotionally of God and God's will, it's their own desire to live that drives them, not heaven.
These people don't care about gay marriage because it involves homosexuals, they care about it because it's a taking away, a usurping, of the decree power of the institutions they are dependent on for their survival.
Gay marriage flaunts disrespect for their authority, for the authority of their institutions, not God; and it's insidious that way because at the same time it accepts the necessity for recognition of the higher authority of the social group.
So it moves the center of power away from where they need it to be.
This is why common-law relationships are far less threatening, though on the surface they would seem to be equally damaging to the institution of marriage itself.
They don't care about marriage, or the trauma and hardship of unwanted teen pregnancy, they care about authority, about who will have the power. Because soon enough that power will decide, not who gets maligned and scorned, not even who gets punished and ostracized, but who will live and who will die.
