just keep poking us in the eye

Proposition 8 was justifiably overturned last week in a ruling many people have been awaiting for months.  National Organization for Marriage has begun what they've decided to call their Summer for Marriage Tour, driving around to preach to people about marriage being one man and one woman.

Perhaps in the majority of US states marriage is confined to one man and one woman, but as time slowly creeps on we find that equality keeps growing more than not.  Outside of the US Mexico City is one of the more recent places to find that gay couples should be allowed to marry.  Five US states and a growing handful of countries are realizing that equality benefits all families.

And that is one of the most hurtful things to come out of this culture war, this battle that need not even be fought.  I am gay and have a family.  I have children, and I'm most certainly not the only gay person with children.  But to hear NOM talk about family you'd think that children only appear when a loving heterosexual couple marries with the intent to produce children and raise them in a loving home.

Families come about in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons.  Some people do in fact marry and make babies and stay together till death do them part.  Sometimes a person's loved one dies leaving them alone with the children.  Sometimes children find their birth parents gone and no longer part of their life for any number of reasons.  Sometimes people are unable to have their own children and are willing to create a family through adoption to provide a family for children without parents.  Sometimes families combine two pre-existing families to create a new family.  And to pretend that only the first type of family I mentioned is the only kind of family that is real or that actually exists is to insult every single other type of family, to degrade them as worthless and not of value.

And that is what NOM does every single day and every minute of every day that they exist.  They've spent untold millions of dollars fighting this culture war that need not exist, dollars that could do the thing their Bible actually tells them to do, help the weak and downtrodden, the hungry and the hurting.

But instead of doing that they are making a point of making sure more people are weak and downtrodden, increasing the number of hungry and hurting.

If you want to follow their evil trip to spread hurt then visit the Courage Campaign's Prop 8 Trial Tracker blog.  They began earlier this year to make sure that anyone interested was able to keep abreast of the Prop 8 trial, and they've continued their work as we've waited for the verdict (great post about that HERE) and are now on the front lines documenting NOM's bus of animus tour.