When I saw a story on The Huffington Post about Joe Biden calling gay marriage "inevitable", I thought it was a good opportunity to get my solution to this whole debate out there. As I've posted here before, I think that the US government should just get out of the "marriage" business. Repeal DOMA, take marriage rights and rename them civil unions and give all consensual adult couples equal protection under the law. Seems like a simple fix to me. The religious people can get back to actually protecting the sanctity of marriage (which I always felt had more to do with "love, honor" and "til death do us part" than the "man and woman" part) and gays will get their equal rights.

However one thing that I was noticing was that a lot of people were arguing the genetics side of the issue. After writing my bit about civil unions for consensual adult couples, I added that I think the gay gene discussion should be avoided because it takes the debate away from equal rights and into biology. I also added that I myself don't exactly buy the whole gay gene as the be all, end all and think that nurture has as much, if not more, to do with people's sexuality. (Although, especially from a cultural angle, I think "sexuality" is a man made concept.)

I know I shouldn't be surprised by this but I was a bit shocked to see immediate responses to my post and almost all of them were blasting me personally... and it was from liberals because of my take on the gay gene. Now, not only were these responses proving my point about how the genetics issue takes the debate to a place where it need not be and makes people overlook the actual subject of the debate but it showed me that when it comes to matters of faith, many liberals treat science in the way that conservatives treat God.

Now I understand the immediate response from the Left will be that science can be proven while God is a fable or fairy tale and I'm not dismissing all science or lumping it in with religion. What I'm talking about is how there is a great number of people who will leap to embrace the findings of a single study, a study that has gone under none of the academic rigor that is required to truly be considered a viable test, and simply accept it as "fact". People treat these "discoveries" the same way as religious types treat miracles, both groups are striving for answers - one finds it in a unapproachable higher power, the others find it in uncorroborated studies. For instance, articles that pronounce that studies have found "conclusively that sexual orientation in men has a genetic cause" will usually also contain a bit (usually buried in the later passages) that there is no gay gene per se but "probably a handful of genes that work in ways as yet unexplained." Call me a stickler but I don't think someone can say "conclusively" and "cause" when it's followed by "probably" and "unexplained". Again, we're not talking rigorously tested, scientifically proven causality here; it's just faith with a different beneficiary.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the the gay gene is the new "Leaches cure sickness" or cold fusion; I'm saying that even those geneticists who are trying to find the gene openly admit that environmental elements, especially from the womb to early childhood, have a huge impact, possibly even greater than the genetics, which they haven't been able to actually prove exists.

Still, when liberals get a piece of science stuck in their craw, they refuse to give it up. Even if it's beside the point. In terms of the actual gay marriage debate, why bring genetics up? If someone is citing the Bible, all you have to say is that the New Testament forbids interfaith marriage and marriage to atheists - should those couples also not be able to get marriage rights? If someone argues that people CHOOSE to be gay, the response is that nobody does that. We can't explain why people turn out that way but it's most certainly not a choice. Sexual attraction isn't like choosing a diet. You don't need to say any more than that. It's not like they can push for a burden of proof. These are people who believe dinosaurs roamed the Earth with humans, Noah built an ark with two of every animal, and don't think it's weird that the story of Jesus Christ seems like a mash-up of many previous deity stories and myths. Or as Louie C.K. brilliantly portrayed it...

And while I love that bit and I hate to say this, it seems like liberals are often treating scientific studies with the same blind faith. Instead of saying, "It says heaven", they'll argue that "Oh, some researcher in Korea found something in fruit flies." To act like the ability to cite an uncorroborated medical study somehow makes them better than people with faith just strikes me as fairly hypocritical. Also hypocritical is the fact that many of these people act like religious types lower the level of debate and then post one line, dismissive posts that add nothing of any substance.

But really, the lesson of this rant is that I really shouldn't bother wasting time in the comments section of websites. I've been pretty good about avoiding them this year but I probably need to make it a resolution again this year because I still sometimes fall off the wagon and get caught up in a pointless debate with people who often feel like they are beyond having to prove their own point. It's a waste of time. My brother reminded me of a great cartoon which I should really commit to memory.

Anyway, Merry Christmas everyone. Hope you and yours have a great weekend.