Should ________ be allowed to ________?

On one hand, the citizens of the world and the leaders who supposedly represent them are obligated to enforce and dictate law of protection and decency. To that end…

Should pedophiles be allowed to view child pornography? Obviously not, since pedophilia is universally recognized as criminal and destructive, even by pedophiles themselves.

Should gays be allowed to marry each other? Ah, the real gist of this post. Two things make this question fundamentally different from the first one. 1) Is it universally held that gays marrying each other is criminal and destructive, and 2) Would the public and its leadership be protecting anyone from a crime by preventing gay marriage? No to both questions.

Or consider this: less than 100 years ago, this question would be in play in America, and it was essentially the same question:

Should women be allowed to vote? You think I’m kidding? There was a time in our country when the ruling class, men, thought it absurd to let women vote. They thought it as strongly as today’s gay marriage opponents.

My point is that everyone, from the white, married, Christian, middle-class man to the black, gay, Islamic woman, and everyone in between, deserves equal rights and equal freedom.

It should never be the government’s job to decide who deserves what, unless the government and those who run it actually believe they are gods. (Sidebar: that is sometimes the case.)

I should state that I am against any laws, any at all, that dictate or decide how anyone thinks, believes, and behaves, as long as that behavior doesn’t harm others. (Sidebar: Christians, gays marrying each other does not harm you. The harm you are feeling comes from your childish fears and the mistaken belief that the behavior of other “undermines” your “way of life.” Your way of life, of course, is the only right way in your view. It takes a pretty myopic world view to think that you and only you know what’s best for the entire world.)

Or how about this: people who worry about gay marriage don’t have enough to do.

By that I mean this: about 20,000 children starve to death every day. About 1500 people are murdered each day. Approximately 112,000 people have died so far in the war in Iraq. More than 700,000 people, mostly children, die from malaria each year. Nearly 2,000,000 people died from tuberculosis each year. About 7,500,000 people die from cancer each year. 112,000 people in America die from obesity-related illness every year. There are more than 440,000 deaths caused by tobacco each year in America.

But with all this and much, much more, your biggest concern is preventing two people who love each other from being married. This is a crippling distortion of reality. Get. Over. It.

I’m going to add something here that may get me in hot water with the gay community, and say that no, I don’t think that anyone is “born” gay. This isn’t because I don’t think people are hard wired to be straight or gay, which I do. It’s that I don’t think anyone who is healthy at birth is born to be anything. I think that hard wiring mostly happens in the first five years of a child’s life. I have personally witnessed how lives have been enriched or ruined as a direct result of these first five years.

I am open to reasonable comments on that last point, but as always I won’t approve angry or insulting comments.

In conclusion, “Should ________ be allowed to ________?”

Yes, everyone should be allow to shut the f*ck up as much as they want.