Happy Valentine's Day, Gays and Fundamentalists!
Metro NY — that would be the green-accented mediocre paper you're accosted with as you try to get on the train — today has a piece on the annual Valentine's Day gay-rights protest staged by Marriage Equality New York. Cathy and Sheila Marino-Thomas, who have been together for 13 years and have a six-year-old daughter, were scheduled to request a marriage license from the City Clerk's office at 8 o'clock this morning. They were also scheduled to be turned down, of course, which is what makes it a protest.
A counter-protest is naturally scheduled for 11:30 this morning, at which a group of Evangelical Christian ministers will gather to tell the world of Cathy and Sheila's evil and marriage-destroying plans. It is, one assumes, the sort of group that starts in Oklahoma or Missouri or someplace, picks up some true believers along the way, and then arrives in Manhattan to tell us Godless infidels what we're doing wrong. And, indeed, Metro features just such a central-casting quote from just one of those central-casting preachers:
"If we have gay marriages today, what's going to be the definition of marriage tomorrow? Could it encompass a third person or a fourth person in the same marriage? Could it encompass children? Once you change the definition of what a marriage is, it becomes a slippery slope."
While we were wondering about why the preacher isn't also concerned about obvious inevitability of bestiality in a world where gays can marry, we noticed something even scarier: The quote came from the Rev. Michel Faulkner, pastor of the Central Baptist Church on the Upper West Side.
The red states are encroaching. Fuck.
