So, if you hadn’t heard, the Californian Supreme Court recently overturned a law that banned same-sex marriage as unconstitutional, deeming any law that restricted the rights of homosexual couples to marry to be discriminatory. This is frankly excellent news, as apparently it’s inspired several other states to attempt the same thing.

The utterly predictable reaction of the conservative religious lot, of course, was to rant and rave about the need to protect the sanctity of marriage and defend the family and so on (incidentally, one of the bills attempting to make same-sex marriage legal, in Minnesota, was entitled the "Marriage and Family Protection Act" — oh, the irony). A fun quote from some conservative nutjob: "No matter how you stretch California’s Constitution, you cannot find anywhere in its text, its history or tradition that now, after so many years, it magically protects what most societies condemn," says Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. Well, sorry, but a) the fact that most societies condemn it doesn’t make it wrong, and b) the fact that it hasn’t been interpreted specifically as protecting gay people in the past doesn’t mean that it doesn’t — or do you expect it to explicitly list every single group who’re entitled to equal rights? (I’d suggest that California’s constitution may be old enough not to explicitly list women and black people as deserving of rights, and ask if that means they should be considered inferior, but I’m worried he’d say yes.)

Then it hit me. Racist groups like the BNP say that it’s not that they hate people who aren’t white — it’s just that they want to help white people, to defend them in the face of the rampaging hordes of illegal immigrants (and legal ones, and people whose grandparents moved to England in the Fifties, and so on). Homophobic groups like the Catholic Church [1] say that it’s not that they hate gay people, it’s just that they want to protect straight people’s right to get married, and have all sorts of legal and financial benefits (if I remember correctly, married couples in the US get something like 1,000 different benefits that unmarried couples aren’t entitled to).

Bigotry is all the same, no matter who it’s directed at. Hopefully, one day people will learn to keep their neuroses to themselves, and allow the rest of us to live our lives without paying attention to what their imaginary friend tells them.

The F-Word posted a video of some BNP* leader talking about women’s rights.

It’s part of a racist attack on Islam, in which he appears to be trying to cover for his bigotry in one aspect by presenting himself as unbigoted in another; basically, he’s complaining about Islam’s treatment of women. However, he loses all credibility by making it not about a woman’s right to wear what she likes without being spat at and abused in the street, but about his right to look at women wearing low-cut tops. Surprise, surprise, a BNP member who’s completely clueless…

* British Nationalist Party, or Bunch of Nazi Pricks.

Came across this news article, in which some random bishop is quoted as saying:

"Multiculturalism is stirring up lots of problems. This should be a country that is tolerant of other cultures but they should be minority cultures and not equal. To expect every religion to be equal to Christainity [sic] is dangerous.

"It stirs up resentment between many people and can lead to extreme political parties and far right movements which I don’t agree with."

Wait…what? Allowing people to be equal leads to groups like the BNP existing? So, to get rid of the BNP, all we have to do is make sure that white, heterosexual, Christian males have all the power, and everybody else is inferior to them. In other words, to get rid of the BNP we need to do exactly what they want.

Bloody hell. For your own sake, please, think before you speak.

(He does, of course, have a point. If white, heterosexual, Christian males had all the power, then the BNP wouldn’t have any need to exist, so in a sense, treating everybody as equal does lead to extreme far-right groups existing. However, the solution to that is to get rid of the extreme far-righters, not the equality. So, I’ll just point out that I think this bishop is an arsehole and be done with it. Hey, I bet that if the USA hadn’t abolished slavery, the KKK would never have existed either.)

I meant to post this last night, but forgot. It’s a letter written a few years ago by Thomas Bushnell, explaining why homophobia isn’t like racism.

It’s on his LiveJournal, here.

(Actually, read more of his blog, there’s quite a bit of good philosophical stuff there.)