Andrea Masciari

People and clergy everywhere are leaving their churches, temples, and mosques to assertively collaborate, in the name of religious morality, against a community of people that desires nothing more than an uncomplicated government decree sanctioning their lives together, in the peaceful comfort of each other’s love.  They want to live peacefully and productively, without intrusion upon their right to protect their marriage partners in life, until death.  I have found no comfort in assurances of clergymen preaching about the immorality of gay men and lesbians; these men have not convinced me that they did not know their priests were violating hundreds of children in the most awful way.  They have not promised each child that they would have stopped the molesting, if only they had known.  They are not weeping for their vulnerable, trusting young charges who suffered at the hands of wicked men, while under the watchful, adoring eyes of God, in the human persona of Christ himself.  Yet, the deafening outrage of those who perceive themselves to espouse the epitome of morality have risen up in a thunderous statement of condemnation toward people who simply believe their love for each other is worthy of a tax credit and the same civil rights entitled to the rest of us.

I don’t understand why these congregations of clergymen and their flocks of ardent followers are not confronting the human monsters in remote villages of Cambodia, Thailand and India, doing everything in their power to rescue children from the multi-million dollar sexual slave trade?  Tell me why they mustered up the concerted energy to prevent passage of a simple legislative bill, but they will not address the immoral behavior of American family courts who award custodial parental rights to unfit mothers whose only semblance of motherhood is a brief stay in a hospital birthing room.

What will it take for self-righteous clerics to join forces, to rise up, fight, and speak against, the immorality of evil permeating every neighborhood, every city, and every country in this pitiful world of ours?  My God, one would expect intelligent, peace-loving leaders to know better, to understand that people in our country cherish the right to embrace whomever they choose without some bully government or clergyman bashing in their spirit in the name of the holy sanctity of their definition of what marriage is supposed to be.

We all know that scores of heterosexual couples find in divorce, freedom from abusive or unfaithful partners.  Men and women escape in droves from the humdrum life of 30-minute suppers, hectic days at the office, and evenings filled with piles of dirty laundry, sibling rivalry and disappointing hours in front of blaring television sets.  Perhaps others solve their own personal crises through extra-marital affairs which so often lead to vicious child custody battles and the ultimate dissolution of their blessed marriages, no matter if they practice Catholicism, Judaism or Islam.  Evangelical or not, they should proclaim their moral standards on their own bedroom walls, not on the front doors of those who may love differently, and perhaps less conditionally, than they do.

Some couples dissolve their hallowed unions at the drop of a hat, with no apparent moral conflict and with little regard for the children who suffer in the selfishness of parents who want nothing but to feed an insatiable desire for more cake than they actually deserve to eat.  Certainly, my own traditional, intact marriage will not suffer if the women down the street join hands in civil matrimony.   They already set an example of exemplary relationships that enhances, not hinders, familial cohesiveness and a gentle love of those who may behave a bit differently than most of us, in the privacy of their homes.

Society must eradicate the physical and sexual abuse of its most vulnerable citizens before it attempts to hinder the freedom of a harmless faction of our population.  Let all decent Americans, as tainted and imperfect as we are, consider the damage already done by the immoral and evil perpetrators of crimes against humankind’s children.  Then let society come to its moral senses and imagine, as our beloved John Lennon dreamed, all the people living life in peace.