Reply #17: But if you can say

[ruggerson]

"laws aimed at preventing gay marriage, as odious as I find them, can't reasonably be compared with the racial laws introduced in Germany", then you don't quite get what those laws actually do.

They deny gays and lesbians the legal foundation on which to form families. They legally create a status of second class citizenry in a country putatively founded on the notion that all men are created equal.

The administration of George Bush, the Republican National Committee and the entire infrastructure of the political organization known as the "religious right" are using gays and lesbians in a horrific, relentless campaign of scapegoating and hatred.

The similarities to 1933 Germany are not only there, but they are striking and profound.

You say, in rebuttal, that the "trend in this country has been an increasing exceptance (sic) of gays"

One could make a similar argument that the Jews were a lot better off in Berlin in the early 1900's than they had been at any time in Europe since the Diaspora, that the tide of history was inexorably moving in their favor. And it was.

And then came an extraordinary set of political and cultural events peculiar to 1930's Germany, which set in motion the Holocaust, but the seeds of it were lain in the bigotry and the racism which preceded those events.

The one thing that could conceivably stop such an occurrence here is the fact that we live in the information age, and that any variation of a "final solution" that the religious right might attempt to set in motion for gays and lesbians could not be kept secret and in the dark for long. The communications revolution would stem, and probably stop, anything as horrible as what occurred in Nazi Germany.

But to deny the striking similarities between early 1930's Germany versus the Jews and early 2000's America versus gays is to completely blind yourself to what your government is actually doing to gays and lesbian families.