AFP: Lawsuits to challenge California gay marriage ban.
You’ve been waiting for me to comment on this, haven’t you?
For those of you who don’t know, Proposition 8 was voted on in the recent elections in the USA’s California. The intention was to write into the constitution of that State that marriage was between a man and a woman only. Sounds a bit like the change to the marriage Act here in Australia.
Anyway, I’m not particularly surprised to see that the change has been carried. 52% of the voters said yes. You know, this is a nation that still has vast parts of their population that think God created the universe in just 6 days. Fuck he’s good.
The bit that gets me is the amount of money spent on this. The mormon church has been accused of spending $15,000,000 that’s fifteen million dollars, on the campaign. How many people could you actually help with that sort of money?
A 10kg bag of rice at the local supermarket costs $21.00, for $15 mil you could get about 714,000 bags of rice, and that’s at retail cost.
Lets say, for a family of 4, two meals a day of rice would be 500 grams of rice, each bag would therefore feed about 20 people. 714,000 bags of rice would therefore feed about 14 million people in one day.
So, my figures are rubbery, and there’s a lot more to distributing food than just me sitting here with my calculator and bright ideas. But it doesn’t hide the fact that rather than help the world, the church, in this case the mormons, would sooner squander their money on an advertising campaign to prevent two blokes from getting married, an act that doesn’t really hurt anyone else, rather than do something useful with their money. Marriage is simply a human construct. Yes, its nice to get married (been there), yes its nice to commit to another human, but whether or not you get married legally does not prevent people from actually living together, in a married like state.
This is clearly mad. There’s so much good to do in the world, and yet we have the fucking christians (and the mormons) doing stupid things with their money. This has yet again hardened my attitude of not supporting any organisation that has remote ties to christianity, I want my time, my money and my efforts to go to help people, not be used to force misguided moral and ethical decisions on people.
Other respectable blogs that talk about this:
Alexander the Atheist
Californians Against Hate
Russell Coker