What’s
Rationale for Outlawing Gay Sex?
The
Repository, May 15, 2003
500 S. Market Ave., Canton, OH 44702
Fax: 330-454-5745
Email: letters@rep-printing.com
Letters
If we’re going to outlaw gay sex, we have to have a
good, solid rationale for doing so. You have to demonstrate specifically who
is victimized by the behavior and how. But people like Rick Santorum, John Leo
and others offer only phony logic and shaky rationales meant to divert
attention from the simple fact that they just plain don’t like the thought
of men having sex with men and women having sex with women. But in a
relatively free society, you don’t outlaw acts based solely on your personal
preferences.
But this call for outlawing gay sex goes beyond being a
minor annoyance when public figures like Santorum, Rush Limbaugh and Leo
engage in it and rally their followers around them. When it goes this far, it
begins to smack of fascism. The Nazis used similarly phony logic to build
hatred of Jews in 1930s Germany. In “Mein Kampf” lies the rationale Hitler
founded his condemnation of Jews on, and although it seems on the surface to
be well-reasoned, when you look more deeply into it, you begin to see how raw
hatred masquerades as reason.
What I’m saying is that this condemnation of gay
people, gone unchecked, can be dangerous. It may seem to be relatively
harmless now, but in it are the roots of abuse of humanity.
As the Nazis rose to power, the German people—most of
whom would never have harmed a single soul themselves—thought Hitler’s
ideas were relatively harmless, too. But like the proverbial frog who
doesn’t notice his body getting warmer until it’s too late to jump out of
the boiling water, they didn’t speak out, and eventually they learned that
the roundup of Jews had started and they couldn’t stop it. I, for one,
intend to speak out.
—Craig Schroeder, Canton
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