This week, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a handful of cases that have been brought to the high court. All of the cases are appeals from states that deal with whether or not any state government can enact laws that forbid homosexual couples from becoming legally married. The fight for marriage equality has been raging for decades in the U.S., with many pointing to the infamous Stonewall riots as a turning point for the LGBT community and tracing a line from there all the way up to this week’s Supreme Court hearing. Proponents of marriage equality feel the momentum has never been this much on their side, and are cautiously optimistic that an era of systemic discrimination could possibly, finally, draw to a close.
But many in America are not quite so thrilled at the prospect of two adults who love each other declaring that love for one another in a ceremony that no one has to attend if they don’t want to. Socially conservative Americans — like all of the officially announced and presumptive Republican candidates for president in 2016 — are vehemently opposed to the idea of letting love between two consenting adults be declared in any official capacity if the two adults are not a biological man and a biological woman.
State Rep. Thom Thompaulsen (R) was tasked by the Republican National Committee to explain the conservative argument against gay marriage. “Look, we get it, all this ‘love must win’ stuff is good political theater,” Thompaulsen told The Political Garbage Chute in a phone interview. “But what does love have to do with our rights as religious Americans to express our religious beliefs,” asked Thompaulsen rhetorically. “It just so happens that my religious beliefs entitle me to be an asshole to gay people. It’s not my fault they’re gay and I’m an asshole, is it? I was born an asshole; I have no choice but to be an asshole. It’s what assholes do. We judge people. We make them feel bad because we think our centuries’ old religious texts give us moral high ground to insult and degrade other human beings because we think butt sex is icky,” Rep. Thompaulsen told us, “and in America, you have to respect our right to discriminate more than their right to not be discriminated against.”
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has been one of the most vocal opponents to marriage equality released a statement on a cocktail napkin that said, “In America, religious assholery is enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment. Separation of Church and State is not also ‘separation of asshole and victims of assholeness.’ That is the way God intended it when he helped James Madison write the Constitution in the Bible’s image, and that is how it will stay if I am elected President of these great United States of America.”
Televangelist Pat Robertson released his own statement claiming that “Abraham Lincoln and George Washington would be appalled that uppity gays think their right to not be discriminated against and openly love whichever adult they happen to love trumps my right to be an obstinate, backwards, hate mongering douchebag asshole fuckface. That gives me a tremendous sad, and when I decided to be TV star — er I mean a man of the cloth devoted to God’s message — I didn’t sign up for the part where Jesus was all like, ‘Do unto others as you’d have done unto you.”
“The bottom line is a simple one,” Thompaulsen told us at one point during our interview. “You can’t have liberty unless it means I have the liberty to cause unnecessary stress, and emotional pain to you because of my religion. My belief in an invisible sky man means I get to tell you, an actual living, breathing adult human that you are not allowed to have something the rest of us have. I back this up with my idiotic and unfounded claim that homosexuality is a choice — and I of course therefore ignore the fact that choice itself is indicative of freedom and therefore in a truly free society homosexuals would absolutely be free to marry whomever they choose. And there is nothing that any of godless, amoral, feckless, gun hating, abortion promoting liberal can do about it.”
Cruz was asked at a campaign meet and greet being held at a Chik-Fil-A how he thinks the idea of a government that can control who gets married to whom fits with his narrative that government should be small an unobtrusive. “That is just a gotcha question from a gotcha member of the gotcha liberal lamestream gotcha media,” Cruz told reporters. “The fact is that we social conservatives do believe in small government, even though we advocate giving the state the right to dictate to an adult who they can openly declare their love and devotion to,” the Texas Republican said.
“We just believe in government small enough to fit up your asshole, to make sure you’re not putting anything up there we don’t approve of,” Cruz said as he washed down his fried chicken sandwich with a 32-ounce cup of Haterade.
