COLUMN: Don’t blame God for hate

Editor,

I’ve been reading the opinion section for the past few weeks, and today I realized something: After reading many letters in defense of “traditional marriage,” phrases such as “traditional marriage should be saved,” “traditional family be trampled upon,” and so forth seem to be common in many of the letters.

Noticing these phrases helped me realize that maybe the whole gay marriage debate is just a huge miscommunication. See, those of us in support of letting gay people marry those they love are still in support of straight “traditional” marriage! All this time you’ve thought that we were trading straight marriage for gay marriage, that we’d null all straight marriages, require that men date men, women date women, we’d all become anarchists and atheists, the sky would fall, the end would come, and our nation would fall like Rome. How silly! I’m glad we could clear that up.

Luckily, in our nation we can have gay and straight marriage, chocolate and vanilla, Republican and Democrat, Catholic and LDS, Coke and Pepsi, Letterman and Leno.

As for God being against gay marriage, I’m not convinced. God may want us to marry in a temple, but that doesn’t mean he wants us to criminalize non-temple marriages. God may want us to believe in him or in one true church, but I doubt he wants us to criminalize non-believers. God may want us to marry only those whose gender is opposite ours, but I’d hope God wants us to marry the person we love. Don’t bother judging others’ love on a religious level because that’s reserved for God.

Of course, it’s possible that some people are just saying equal rights will destroy “traditional” marriage, when actually they just dislike the idea of equal rights. If so, stop hiding behind God and doomsday threats. If you hate gay people, or at least gay people having equal rights, just say so. We live in the United States and you can express those opinions if you like. If you’re a bigot, just say so. Don’t blame it on God.

Lewis Ty Grant