Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State — the guy who, last month, wanted to block thousands of new voter registrations because they were on the wrong paper stock — said on Tuesday that gay marriage “even defies barnyard logic.”
“I don’t know how many of you have a farming background, but I can tell you right now that notion [gay marriage] even defies barnyard logic… the barnyard knows better.”
Blackwell said he wasn’t criticizing gay people — just gay marriage.
“I believe this issue is not about civil rights, but about a sacred right,” he said in an interview. “One of the functions of marriage is for men and women to replenish the earth.”
He used the barnyard analogy, he said, “because if you’re on a farm and you want eggs to eat and little chickens to grow into big chickens, you need a rooster and a hen.”
Let’s see. It’s not about civil rights? It’s about a sacred right? Sorry, Blackwell — wrong country. The government here doesn’t get involved in “sacred rights.”
And the thing about the rooster and the hen? That’s one of the anti-gay-marriage arguments that infuriates me the most. It always become this slippery-slope thing — that if we permit gay marriage, we’re going to ban heterosexual marriage, or, worse, prohibit heterosexual intercourse. The flip side seems to be that if we ban gay marriage, we’ll somehow channel all those gay people into heterosexual marriage or heterosexual sex. Sorry — not gonna happen. After all, it’s not working now, is it?
And unless we’re raising human beings in order to eat them or their by-products, I don’t see how the analogy is even relevant.
I fucking hate it when people who can’t think are in positions of power.
He must have never been raised anywhere near a barnyard. My family bred sheep when i was growing up (and, bzw, this says nothing about my age or generation for the age-ists who frequent this site ;-), and i gotta tell you, homosexuality sure does pop up in the barnyard in the most natural of ways (e.g., i never saw a ram/ewe converting another into being a practicing homosexual animal — not that it didn’t happen in the quiet of night, but certainly not in the light of day).
Ask anyone whose bred animals and they’ll tell you there are certainly bisexual and homosexuals animals are various persuasions, and that it’s pretty much genetic or stress-n-the-womb caused.
rob@egoz.org
I grew up on a farm- we always had homo animals.