Getting Used to Being a Bigot

In my quest to find some meaningful things to say about Libertarianism, I simply can't at the same time be blamed for coming across pure idiocy and feeling the need to say at least something about it....

As best as I can imagine it, waking up one morning to find out that you're officially considered a bigot has to be pretty hard. Naturally there's going to be some backlash, denial, a little bit of anger, some bargaining and rationality, so on. On the face of it, it can often appear that the bigot has a point until you think a little deeper and see that it's all just a manifestation of the stages of grief. The grief and bigotry in the case I'm talking about is the kind directed towards the gay and lesbian community and their rights to marry. Evidently, or so I'd be convinced to think, bigots have rights to be bigots - or something like that.

Consider the article here on same-sex marriage and the lessons we can learn from Canada. Apparently with the Canadian government recognizing same-sex marriages some additionally terrible things happened. The "...legal and cultural effect was much broader." in that, "What transpired was the adoption of a new orthodoxy: that same-sex relationships are, in every way, the equivalent of traditional marriage, and that same-sex marriage must therefore be treated identically to traditional marriage in law and in public life." Pardon the language here, but isn't that the fuckin' point? I mean seriously unless I'm a complete idiot it seems perfectly logical to me that once you grant same-sex marriage rights that also entails all the 'orthodoxy' of traditional marriage. So what's the problem here?

The problem is, well, it's just mighty hard getting used to the idea that you're a bigot, we continue on:

"A corollary is that anyone who rejects the new orthodoxy must be acting on the basis of bigotry and animus toward gay and lesbians. Any statement of disagreement with same-sex marriage is thus considered a strait forward manifestation of hatred...."

Well, okay, the first and obvious problem with this is that it isn't really a corollary, and whereas that may seem a little trivial for me to point out, I doesn't end up that way. i.e. Same-sex marriage rights aren't just about same-sex marriage rights, [again] they entail all of the human rights issues and orthodoxy of traditional marriage. It's not as though we're in a situation where we've extended the rights, but good luck finding an asshole who will actually extend those rights to you. For example:

"Civil marriage commissioners were the first to feel the hard edge of the new orthodoxy; several provinces refused to allow commissioners a right of conscience to refuse to preside over same-sex weddings, and demanded their resignation."

Notwithstanding other controversial issues within the article, this is not an example of simple free speech or protest rights being trampled upon, but a plain old refusal to comply with an individuals rights and civil liberties. Could any of us (even the individual who wrote this article) imagine decades after the civil rights movement refusing to give a hair-cut to an African-America because it violated our conscience? Perhaps there are some out there who still feel that way, however by and large I'd tend to think we'd all find that rather ridiculous, and this isn't any different. This is, by and large, an example of people going through their own internal struggle (a sort of grief process), but why should we feel sorry for them? They woke up one day and were officially a bigot, and now we're all supposed to feel sorry for them.....