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Of All Things Continuing

One of the cool features of Facebook is the ability to see what your friends are up to through a feature called “news feeds”. Recently, I noticed a friend of mine joined a group called Against Homosexual Adoption which both surprised and startled me. So I decided to venture into this group and see what it was all about.

There’s a little over 100 people joining this group (including those who joined the group to retort against the main message), ranging from students attending prestigious universities in the United States, to high schoolers. Those who have an opinion against homosexual adoption have chosen to quote Biblical references, while those who choose to take the opposite end of the argument quote outside sources such as scientific findings and scholarly reports. This got me thinking: When the argument of homosexuality is presented for debate, it seems like anyone against it usually quotes the Bible while others quote outside references.

I presented this idea to the group on Facebook, and…well, it wasn’t well-received. Kelsey Robertson of Notre Dame and Mary Coran of Fort Carson High School in Colorado, the top repliers to my idea, had some pretty interesting arguments against my point—though none were supported outside the realm of Biblical references, and occasionally they were mixed with latent insults.

Mary Coran is the front insulter of the group, claiming that September 11th was funded by terrorists running the “Iraquian” government (even though our own President said months ago that Iraq had nothing to do with the terror attacks of September 11th), and further stating that homosexuals are indirectly to blame for the terror attacks six years ago due to a lack of divine protection. Mary intermingles her opinions, which have yet to be backed by concrete facts that venture outside the realm of religion, with insults against liberals and personal attacks toward anyone whose views do not align parallel with her own.

Kelsey Robertson attempts to take a more intellectual approach to the issue of homosexuality, arguing that homosexuality is against the moral fiber of the principles the United States was founded upon. However, Kelsey also brings up the issue of homosexuality and the AIDS pandemic, to which she believes that AIDS is a lifestyle disease—the result of immoral choices of Americans, in comparison to emphysema and alcoholism. When asked how she felt after finding out that nearly 600,000 children died from AIDS in 2005, Kelsey responded by saying that those statistics were “not based on the situation in America”. But like Mary, it didn’t take long before Kelsey became frustrated with the opposition to her opinions and began the insults of her own.

The debate in this forum no longer tackles the specific issue of homosexual adoption. Instead, focus has shifted to the larger topic of how homosexuality is viewed in religion, and how the laws of the United States should be backed based not upon concrete establishments, scientific findings, tolerance or equality, but upon mere faith.

But the debate in this forum also exposes an very ugly element that many hoped to eradicate with the civil rights movements of the 20th Century—the element of hate. Here, we have the voices of two women who today exercise every freedom under the United States Constitution as a result of equality reform in areas, such as voting (women’s suffrage). Two hundred years ago, men would argue that God would view women’s rights as an abomination and sin; today, these two women have chosen to exercise these rights and privileges they were once denied as citizens of the United States to oppress fellow human beings based on religious views.

In addition, Mary and Kelsey are bringing to light the issue of how our educational system here in the United States is handling the issue of equality and acceptance across many platforms of human beings. Mary is demonstrating that our high schools are not doing enough to promote peace, tolerance and acceptance of all human beings, regardless of religious or political views, at a crucial point in a person’s development that could shape the way that person interacts as an individual and within society. Kelsey represents a person who was not thoroughly educated on the matters of equality and respect during development and has created personal belief structures that are dangerous to the well-being of human society.

We have here two voices that are extremely dangerous—voices that subconsciously lend support to the radical ideas behind organizations like the Westboro Baptist Church and the Ku Klux Klan. They are voices that promote hate and intolerance toward anyone who can be viewed as different, yet they stem from individuals who forget that just two hundred years ago, they would not have the right to a voice. They are voices that come from individuals, yielding the platform to remind all of us why it is imperative that we teach our children that it is not okay to hate anyone based on their belief, identity, biology or choice. These teachings begin with two groups of people: Those found at home, and those found in our schools.

However, we live in a society these days when even parents can breed to their children hate, as evident with Fred Phelps, members of the KKK and even certain political groups. That is why now more than ever, it is important that we reach out to our educational system and demand changes in curriculum to provide the future of tomorrow the necessary conditioning, not in hate, but of acceptance and understanding. When these ideals become institutionalized in our educational systems, they will breed children of tomorrow who will not persecute their peers based on sexual orientation, or gun them down in the streets based on the color of their skin, but who will instead become politicians who can make social changes for equality and lawyers who will fight to protect those changes.

When we can make these developments in our educational system that produce the results of an entirely new agenda, only then can we continue the steps forward to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of children who are not judged on the color of their skin, the orientation of their biology or the choices of their lives, but rather on the content of their character. And hopefully, we can walk past that dream to a world where people are not judged at all.