See, I sometimes watch the news

I have a confession to make. I’m a celebrity rag-aholic. I check out the entertainment news daily. In fact sometimes you can find me surfing to TMZ.com and Perez Hilton a couple times a day. I’m a junkie. However, I only head to CNN maybe once a week. And I rarely catch my local news. I know. I’m pathetic.

So I’m a little ashamed to admit I found out Iowa began allowing same sex marriages today from Perez. But then tonight I was taking a little rest on the couch while preparing dinner [which meant I was napping while waiting for the pizza man to arrive] and the news came on. Of course the top story was this whole gay marriage thing.

Yesterday a judge struck down Iowa’s law against gay marriage stating it “violated the constitutional rights of due process and equal protection of six gay couples who had sued.” The ruling was in Polk county so that was the only county that would give couples a marriage license today. Which pretty much sucked for couples not in the Des Moines area, including some of the six couples who sued.

But the ruling was short lived. By late morning the Recorder announced she was told to stop accepting applications. And later that day the judge ordered an official stay on his decision while the attorneys worked on their appeal.

But one couple, two Iowa State undergrads, was able to get their marriage license AND get married before the stay. They got a judge to waive the three day waiting period. Then they enlisted friends and family to call around to find a judge or minister who would perform the ceremony immediately. After a brief search they found a pastor who married the couple on his front lawn.

As you can imagine the couple and their friends and family are thrilled. But some people aren’t so excited about it. Some moron named Chuck Hurley from the Iowa Family Policy Center said,

I’m deeply saddened that a judge would foist that experiment on all of Iowa. It’s judicial malpractice. It’s cultural malpractice.

Those are big words he’s throwing around there.

“Foist that experiment?” This judge isn’t forcing anything “on all of Iowa.” He allowed [albeit briefly] same sex couples who love each other and are committed to each other to take the step that heterosexual couples have had the right to do for centuries; get married. Allowing marriage and forcing marriage are two very different things.

And “experiment?” You do an experiment to test a hypothesis or to prove something. A marriage is not an experiment. It’s a commitment. It doesn’t matter if you’re marrying a same sex partner or a opposite sex partner. It’s about the level of commitment and love you offer to your partner.

“Judicial malpractice?” I guess that depends on who you ask. I’m sure the gay couples who aren’t allowed to marry consider it judicial malpractice that past judges have trampled all over their rights and spit on their commitment by ruling that marriage is only between a man and a woman. And I don’t believe this judge is gay so it’s not like he was just ruling in favor of whatever benefits him.

“Cultural malpractice?” Now he’s just making shit up.

Then he continued to spout more nonsense.

To experiment on children for the wants and desires of a few adults isn’t loving. That isn’t good. That isn’t something that we want to do. To experiment on children.

WTF? Can anybody decipher what this lunatic is talking about? Experiment on children? Who the hell is experimenting on children?

Denying same sex marriage isn’t stopping people from being gay. Gay people are out there. I’ve seen public displays of affection between two men or two women. And I don’t live in a big city or anything. My children will see it too. Keaton already has when we went to London and hung out with my mom’s friend and her girlfriend. All of my kids have had conversations with their friends about gay people or heard about it on TV. And when they tell me about that or ask me questions about it I use it as an opportunity to educate my children about the different types of relationships there are in the world. I use it as opportunity to teach my children to be open-minded and accept people for who they are instead of being bigoted and judgmental.

Obviously I’m on the side of allowing same sex marriages. I don’t understand why the government feels they have the right to tell people who to love. Or to allow people who are in committed, loving relationships that they have no legal rights to make decisions for the person they’ve spent their life with or to that partner’s estate. The government has no problem sending children to war or spying on people in the name of the Patriot Act, but God forbid two men marry.

And I’m so sick of people using children as their excuse for denying people a right to marriage. Kids don’t know if they’re married or not. I’ve met plenty of people who are with their significant other. Sometimes it’s a spouse. Sometimes it’s a boyfriend/girlfriend. I can’t tell if they are married unless they tell me. I work with a guy who has been with his partner for over 10 years and refers to him as his husband. Obviously they aren’t married, but they’ve been in a committed relationship for so long they refer to each other as such.

Just because it makes you uncomfortable doesn’t give you the right to dictate the decisions they make with their life. It makes me uncomfortable to see people picking their nose or scratching their butt, but I’m not asking the government to deny them their right to do so. [I know. I always come out of left field with these comparisons, but you get my point.]

I guarantee same sex marriages will be legal some day. The younger generation is more tolerant then the old fuddy duddies. It will happen. So, psycho, you can go ahead and get your panties in a wad now about how we are “experimenting on children,” but eventually you are going to lose this battle. And you’ll have to shove your Iowa Family Policy Center up your tightly wound ass.