John Patrick
LV Life Editor

A San Francisco Superior Court judge lifted the ban on gay marriage in California this Monday and there is no doubt in my mind that by the time this column is published the religion addicts will have taken to the streets.

The headlines will be varied, but the general gist will be that a group of Neo-Nazi Klansmen stormed into the state capital screaming the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and slaughtered every so-called queer and queer-sympathizer in sight, while simultaneously performing oral copulation on an effigy of George W. Bush.

Religion addicts are no different than any other addict. They are paranoid, violent people and when they start to feel the walls closing in around them, those tend to be their best qualities. And the walls are definitely closing in on them now.

What these addicts don’t understand is that no talk of god or love or salvation is ever any consolation when you are dealing with someone who believes that you are, first and foremost, an abomination.

That is why the number of openly gay Christians is about the same as the number of poor Republicans. Both are an anomaly—unexplained phenomena that exist only as a sort of necessary cosmic irony.

The legalization of gay marriage in any state would be a major win for the homosexual community, and it would be a win worth being proud of. Zarathustra himself may not have been able to slay that “Thou Shalt Dragon.” But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, the dragon has not been slain yet.

It was only the Superior Court that struck the blow and I suspect that this beast will be less of a dragon and more of a hydra, growing seven new heads full of twisting, jagged metal teeth and hateful eyes out of each freshly cut jugular.

Be it of words or fists or bullets or pens, the battle will be a fierce one, and neither side is likely to stop until the other’s sensibilities have been utterly decimated.

The rush to battle will begin with the President being trotted out yet again by the right wing to call for an amendment that will “protect” marriage. How one protects something by banning a loving expression of it is far beyond my understanding, but apparently if gay people are allowed to get married, all of a sudden society will fall and hordes of formerly straight people will leave their spouses and children to participate in decadent homosexual orgies overseen by Caligula’s rotting corpse.

With such high stakes, everyone will be forced to pick a side in this war.

This is an unpleasant prospect for those who would rather remain neutral, but America was never designed for centrists. In a country with roots that were planted by religious extremists and money-grubbing slave owners, someone without an opinion is just food for the Morlocks.

Yes, these are dark times we live in. Not because gays are demanding the right to marry, but because a large faction of people who believe that an all-powerful invisible man who lives in the sky has forbidden homosexuality, think that this belief is a good enough reason to deny an entire group of people equality.

When it comes down to believing in God or gay marriage, I will choose gay marriage any day. Because when it comes right down to it, I can prove that anal sex exists.

John Patrick, a junior journalism major, is LV Life editor of the Campus Times. He can be reached by e-mail at jpatrick@ulv.edu.