Bully Pulpit

By Bill Maher

Remember that Arizona “religious freedom” bill that gave Christian business owners the right to discriminate against gays, but then Jan Brewer vetoed it?  Well, the Mississippi legislature passed that. Or something very similar. It’s Mississippi – the only hold up was they thought they already had a law that allowed you to discriminate against gays. In Mississippi, if a woman is looking longingly at another woman, she had better be holding a tray of corn muffins.

What ever happened to “Your right to swing your fist ends at my face”? You can believe in your heart of hearts that there’s nothing that makes Jesus angrier than the idea of two dudes bickering over invitation envelopes, but in a so-called free country, where the very first line of our very first official document reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” you’re not supposed to deem other law-abiding citizens as somehow inferior and therefore deserving of fewer rights. That’s what tyrants do.

And the arguments to legally shun homos are getting more and more preposterous. In Oklahoma, there’s a case where two lesbians are suing a Tulsa County Court Clerk because she won’t grant them a marriage license. And lawyers for the clerk argue it’s not really marriage because they can’t procreate. They say marriage is about fostering “potentially procreative sexual relationships into stable unions,” and add, “They (the plaintiffs) reduce marriage from an institution that exists to benefit children and society, and relegate it to a mere stamp through which the government approves loving, emotional unions between adult couples.”  

Yes. Exactly. If states barred people from marrying based on their intention or lack thereof to get pregnant and have kids, then couples that don’t want kids couldn’t get married, infertile couples couldn’t get married, and senior citizens couldn’t get married.  

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a world where Billy Bob Thornton can’t walk down the aisle one more time