Anti-Gay Ideology

Anti-gay Ideology

I was reading the news a few weeks ago when I stumbled across an article about thousands of people in France protesting against same-sex marriage and a new bill that would extend rights to same sex couples.

Around 15-20,000 people showed up, took time out of their lives just to protest and say how they don’t think it’s right for same sex couples to be able to adopt, and how it’s not fair for the child. It shocks me that with this day and age, some people of society are still concerned with the fact that people of the same sex can love each other, get married and have children if they want to. It also shocks me that there is SO much anti-gay hate crime in our world! I then decided that this relates a lot to what we talked about in my sociology class about “ideology” which, to quote Stuart Hall is “the mental frameworks (languages, concepts, systems of representations) which different classes/social groups deploy in order to make sense of the way society works”.

Anti-Gay activists live in a world where their sense of how society works (or should work) is where a woman and a man love each other, get married and have kids. It is not where a woman and a woman love each other, or a man and a man. If these people see things that are out of their norm (same sex couples together in public) they will slander them with names such as calling them dykes, lesbians, fags, and even going as far to telling them they’re going to burn in hell and that God hates them. These people go out of their way to try and convince others that same-sex marriage/love is a sin, and they are the ones who are wrong. They hold protests, they slander them, kids even tease other kids in school if they’re gay, and it is even going as far as hate crimes.

This doesn’t make sense to me at all, but it might be because I have a different ideology. I come from a family who is loving and accepting of everyone, we believe that if you love someone from the same sex that it’s okay! It’s the 21’st century, not the 50’s, we should be acceptable of everyone no matter what. In my life I believe that violence is never the answer; if I didn’t agree with the way someone lived I would never abuse them for it, I would go on with my day because I’m not living their life, they are. I would never protest against someone because they chose to live their lives differently or condone them for wanting to have kids. Compared to what France protestors think, I think it’s fantastic for same-sex couple to adopt children because the children in adoption agencies desperately need a family; and who else better to raise kids then a couple who has been through so much and fought so hard to be able to raise a child?