It's official: the voting majority in Texas has approved a state constitutional ammendment to ban gay marriage. Apparently, it wasn't good enough to have a state law against gay marriage. And sadly, I think everyone could see this coming from a mile away.

The final numbers are not yet in, but it's about 75% for and 25% against the ban. Said another way, 25% of the voters support gay marriage, and 75% support discrimination. I prefer to think well of my fellow Texans (and that's pretty easy to do for folks here here in Austin, unlike the back-asswards people who populate the rest of Texas). But it's a bit unsettling when 3/4 of the population steps up to say, "we're afraid of gay people, we think they're ruining society, and we think it's totally ok to discriminate against other people because they're not like us" [that's my summary of the general point of view, not an actual quotation].

Well hey, to the rest of the non-backward folks out there, I didn't vote to ban gay marriage. In fact, I don't think gay people are causing anywhere near the social disruption that controlling, paranoid, freak-out conservatives cause by being bad parents and weird neighbors, the kind of people who are defined by little more than the church they attend.

You want to see some positive changes in local society? Let's take all of those conservative, controlling, "oh-my-god-everyone-else-is-ruining-society-except-for-me!" people and encourage them to think for themselves. I know that's never going to happen, especially because this whole "gays ruin marriage" war is being led by Christians, and it's Christianity itself that trains people at being good followers, not individuals with the capacity for critical thought. Come on, people, don't you have anything better to do with your time? Aren't there a few areas in your own life that you could stand to improve? Why not start with yourself first, before you go running around trying to fix everyone else? Has it ever occurred to you that if your life sucks in some way, perhaps it has more to do with you than with gay people (or anyone else)? [Answer: Yes, your happiness does have more to do with you than anyone else; this applies to you no matter who you are.]

It's stunning that grown adults will tell you, with as much seriousness as they can muster, that gay people are ruining the sanctity of marriage. News flash: divorce ruins marriage, not gay people. And 1 out of every 2 marriages in this country (between straight couples) results in divorce. That's half of the married population, and that's a goddamn lot of people. Are the gay-bashers too gay-scared and gay-distracted to realize this? Do they think that it's gay people who are causing 50% of straight folks to get divorced? Or maybe they think that straight people didn't even get divorced until gay people came along and started ruining society, so now straight people get divorced 50% of the time?