Vengeance should not be a gay value

Comedian Bill Maher called it the “gay mafia.” Columnist Andrew Sullivan said he is ashamed of the movement he helped create.

What caused this shame? The scorched earth social media attacks of the victorious pro-gay left on those outed for their opposition to gay marriage.

Even the military and professional sports are now open to gays. Uneasy jokes about bending over to pick up a bar of soap in the shower are suddenly as politically incorrect as minstrel shows. Why the hate in victory?

The latest attack on the unrighteous was the boycott organized on the OK Cupid dating site over Brendan Eich’s appointment as the CEO of Mozilla. The site urged its viewers to dump the Mozilla browsers. His sin? He contributed $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8, which attempted to overthrow California’s judicially mandated gay marriage law. In 2008, remember, President Obama was against gay marriage.

For his thought crime, Eich has been forced out of his new job.

In Oregon, the hate from the left is likened to the imposition of a Portlandia Sharia law.

Proposition 8 wouldn’t require gays to wear a purple L on their shirts. It was about whether they should be granted a government privilege that they only recently sought. It wasn’t so long ago that gays wanted to be loud and proud, not quietly mainstream.

Libertarians applaud that OK Cupid did not urge new laws or regulations, but only a private boycott. Boycotts are not the initiation of force that libertarians oppose. They are withholding patronage.

On the other hand, it is troubling that we have a new thought police. It is chilling when political victory turns to private retribution against careers. The website got Eich’s donor information from public sources, as all the Prop 8 donor names were published. One solution to the problem could be allowing anonymous donations to political initiatives and campaigns.

Why should the decision to donate (remember, money is speech) have to require public disclosure? There are initiatives and candidates that are very controversial. Besides homosexual rights, there are initiatives that tackle drug and prostitution legalization, immigration, sexual predator laws, and other hot button issues. If support for one side or the other could lead to career destruction, why shouldn’t individuals be allowed to give anonymously? America has a long history of anonymous political speech. The Federalist Papers were printed anonymously.

Stripping government of most of its gatekeeping powers over marriage is another solution. I have always disliked how the minister blesses a marriage with the words “by the power vested in me by the State of Nevada.” I thought that a minister receives that power from God and his congregation. The Mormons were the first religious group to be persecuted by the federal government, largely because of polygamy. Recently, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that Utah cannot prosecute polygamists so long as they are not officially married. A society where you are equally free to contract a long-term religious marriage without easy divorce, or an open marriage, or even—perish the thought—a bisexual marriage, would eliminate battles over how government is going to define the institution for everyone.

In the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Nevada is no longer supporting the ban on same-gender marriage in the Nevada Constitution which the state’s voters only just approved in 2002. The Mormon-led Coalition for the Defense of Marriage will have to go it alone, a losing proposition. Will those Nevadans defending their religious beliefs about marriage also be the victims of left wing vituperation?

A free society provides space for the religious and secular to coexist. Let government enforce marriage contracts, not define them.