Anti-equality fail

I'm sure many of us have seen our facebook friends and followers profile pictures changing to equality symbols is support of marriage equality. While it's nice to see a lot of people supporting the common sense of equal rights, it has also caused those that somehow have an issue with equality to counter with their regular nonsense. The most common one that I've seen has been a countering of the '=' with '+'.

The explanation is that the the equals sign is made up of two identical shapes that are the same orientation. However, they are forever separated.

Conversely, they claim that the cross (looks more like an addition symbol to me), is the union of two different orientations together as one. And then it is finished up with the meaningless yet expected 'defend marriage'. A rather odd statement since marriage isn't under attack!

But a quick look at the image shows that they really didn't think it through at all. Not a surprise really, but the attempt at clever word play only goes to make this fail even more.

Okay, so the equals sign is presented as being two bars of the same orientation, and forever apart. It's not hard to see that the 'orientation' claim is made in reference to sexual orientation. But it doesn't just say what they think it means. The intention was to push a representation of gay and gay forever apart. But that's just one of the possibilities. But using their criteria, it could equally mean straight and straight forever apart. Not whet they intended, I'm sure. But here are the possibilities the text allows.

• Gay and gay, forever apart
• Straight and straight, forever apart
• Bisexual and bisexual, forever apart
• Asexual and asexual, forever apart

As you can see, the attempt the single our homosexuals exclusively fails miserably. The image actually disallows the union of a pair of ANY sexual orientation... Including the straight man/woman relationship that they want to force all into.

Now lets take a look at the plus symbol. They describe it as the fusion of two different orientations into one (to symbolize marriage). But it obvious that they didn't think that wording through for half a second. I can only thing that they said, the '+' looks sort of like a cross and will work well in a facebook =/+ avatar war. That is just a lazy concept and lazy application. But the concept also fails, and does so miserably.

Remember, these are the people that are only in favor of straight man + straight woman. Those are both the same (sexual) orientation, yet they claim two different are what is needed... So what possibilities does that leave us?

• Straight man/woman + gay man/woman
• Straight man/woman + bi man/woman
• Straight man/woman + asexual man/woman
• Gay man/woman + bi man/woman
• Gay man/woman + asexual man/woman
• Bi man/woman + asexual man/woman

What that leaves us with is plenty of combination, but with the only combination they are in favor of is conspicuously absent. Like I said, failure of concept and application.

There is a second way to look at the chart though. You could say that the equals sign is made of two shapes that are the same, but forever separated. They could represent two men or two women... Which it is doesn't really matter. But then they could say that the addition symbol is the combination of two different shapes to form a binding union of one shape. Man + woman = marriage, if you like. But there's a big problem with that as well.

The addition symbol is NOT made of two different shapes. It's made of the same two shapes as the equals symbol. It's just that one is rotated 90°. If the shapes are meant to represent sexes, the '+' would actually be the fusion of two men or two women. That could be either union in marriage, or even sexual intercourse. Yeah... they are REALLY against those. So if that was the attempted meaning, we find ourselves once again faced with their failure.

Finally, lets take a step back to realize that while the '=' equality symbol is being used to represent equality of sexual orientation, that isn't it's only meaning. An equals symbol is used to represent the word equality.In whole, this symbol is used to promote equality for race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, etc. Yet as soon as it's used for the promotion of marriage equality, the Bible gang has to try to tear it down in totality. Thankfully, they failed as their explanations often do. But it sickens me that someone would wish to destroy a symbol f equality based only on one usage, if at all.

So as a straight married atheist who loves his wife, I implore you to support marriage equality, and equality in every sense really. And if you see this ridiculous image pop up on your newsfeed, please do share this link with them so they can see how much of a fail their =/+ war really is.

-BH


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