Anti-Gay Discrimination - Bigotry or Not?

I'm not really sure how anyone in the voting population has the time to get riled up over gay marriage, especially with so many other things to worry about -- jobs, healthcare, the billions of dollars being spent on Iraq each day, etc. But still, the Republicans insist on making a federal case out of it (no pun intended), just to hopefully get votes come November.

What kills me are the Republican congressmen and talking heads like O'Reilly who get SO offended when someone like Ted Kennedy says that their discriminatory views amount to bigotry. If the marriage ammendment was intended to ban blacks from marrying whites, or Jews from marrying non-Jews, or even citizens from marrying foreign nationals -- wouldn't we all be saying they were bigots? According to my little Webster's Dictionary, a "bigot" is a 'person intolerant or not receptive to ideas of others (esp. on religion, race, etc.)'. That's pretty broad.

Meanwhile, as the Senate debates writing "non-bigoted" discrimination into the Constitution, a military commander in Iraq referred to Iraqi anti-gay violence in an off the cuff manner as bigotry -- as if everyone agrees on it. Responding to criticism that the U.S. military isn't doing enough to protect gay Iraqis who are being kidnapped, killed and otherwise intimidated, the commander said that U.S. forces were doing everything they could to protect homosexual Iraqis from the violent results of bigotry. (Apologies, but I cannot find the story to link to.) Now I know that military personnel aren't necessarily Republicans, but recently they have embraced the GOP talking points when it comes to just about everything. So what's the deal? Maybe soandso didn't get the latest memo.

Frankly, I don't know why these "I'm not a bigot" types don't just come out of the closet already. If you're so adamant about your beliefs and your religion, why not just admit what you are instead of trying to make the rest of us feel all warm and fuzzy about your discriminatory views? During the civil rights movement in this country, were those people who were against racial integration claiming as passionately that they weren't bigots? Somehow I have to imagine that even if they didn't refer to themselves as such, they were at least unapologetic about their views instead of walking some fine line of rhetoric in order to retain the support of moderate voters.

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