Reading the comments on Hemant’s Questions for Anyone Who Voted for Proposition 8, I found, naturally (considering the blog), that most people supported equality, but there were a couple of people who thought that they were acting morally when trying to ban gay marriage. One comment included the following:
I do believe that legalizing gay marriage would directly affect religious freedoms–all in the guise of “equal rights”.
Am I a bigot for supporting what I feel to be morally right?
I do believe that passing this amendment protects religious freedom.
However, that person, though possibly unaware of the fact, has a problem with definitions. Because it’s not about (his) freedom at all, but about (his) power.
I think it was Richard Stallman who once wrote that the difference between a freedom and a power is that the former is being able to decide something which affects mostly yourself, and a power is to be able to decide something that affects mainly others. Now, when you, a religious heterosexual, can (and do) decide what others (gays) can and cannot do, which is the case? It takes an especially convulted and twisted mind — not to mention incredibly selfish and egocentric — to claim that whether gays can marry or not affects you more than it does them1. To decide that they can’t marry is not a question of your freedom, but of you having power over their freedoms.
Also, losing a power you once had does not constitute a “loss of your freedom”, because none of the latter was affected. Christians love to claim that their “religious freedom” is being attacked, but no such thing has ever happened (unless, possibly, in Muslim theocracies), because their freedoms are unaffected; what they are losing is the power they’re used to having — and which they always had, through history, unjustly, and often through physical force.
- e.g. “not oppressing them hurts my feelings, so whether to oppress them or not is all about me.” [↩]
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