My PROP 8 Incident

By: Island Gamer
Early last Saturday morning at around 2:20 am, I was wrapping up my bouncer duty at a bar here in SOCAL. I was on my way home when I noticed a young man blocking a car from reversing it's way out of the parking lot. It was a drunk Christian guy not allowing two women lovers to leave because of his stance on PROP 8. I start to approach him and I'm licking my chops because I've been a "NO" on PROP 8. I've been really pissed off at how religious groups have misled to rally behind PROP 8 all week. I started to cry when I saw the early results on PROP 8 Tuesday night. WTF is California thinking! After all, isn't California supposed to be a liberal state? Isn't California the state that sets the trend for the rest of the nation in terms of tolerance? As I'm walking toward this car of two trapped women, I'm hopeful that this drunk Christian guy will try to approach me with some violence so I can defend myself and beat the shit out of him. I haven't beaten anybody up in a while, it might as well be this guy who's stance on PROP 8 is one I'm disgusted with. Right?

I make it to the vehicle and ask him nicely to move away from the car so the two women can leave. He doesn't move. I reach out and I move him out of the way. The women were able to reverse their car out of their stall and I tell them to have a good night. As they pull away, they said, "NO on PROP 8."

I probably shouldn't of said anything, but I replied with "That's right ladies, NO on PROP 8. It's discrimination."

As I'm walking away, the drunk Christian guy looks at me and says "What the FUCK! What are you talking about?" I turned to him and motion to him to go home. He starts to raise his voice and at this point, we have to escort him out of the parking lot because the neighbors will make complaints. As I'm escorting him out of the parking lot, he continues to get in my face and he's making it difficult. I grabbed him by his neck... and as I'm ready knock this guy out, I realized at that moment that I was becoming the forceful one now. This drunk Christian guy was trying to force his misguided stance on PROP 8 by not allowing the two LBGT women from leaving ... and here I was. Here I stood with my eyes full of disgust ready to punch this guy with a "NO on PROP 8" label on my fist. I was becoming the forceful one now and I needed to back off. This is a battle of intelligence. This is a fight that I would have to fight in a different arena. It has to be fought on changing the way people think about LGBT folks in general, especially in my Samoan community.

Christianity has been embedded into the Samoan culture, whether you're Catholic or Protestant (including the Mormon faith), Samoans are born into this world 99% of the time Christian. To my dismay, this heavy influence of Christianity meant the "YES on PROP 8" campaign penetrated and took a lot of votes even in my inner circle of friends. I've been disappointed for a week now and now I'm ready to do some real fighting.

There have been blogs here, but a lot of them were aimed in the wrong places no matter what side you're on. I've seen posts / blogs on racism and ones that say "Fuck this ___" and "Fuck that ___". My stance is that the "YES on PROP 8" campaign was the more un-Christian stance to take. You don't force your beliefs on other people and you don't take rights away from other individuals, no matter who they are. The other stance is that the divorce ratio, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, is approximately 1 of every 4 heterosexual marriages ending up in divorce. Shouldn't all that campaign money wanting to "protect marriage between a man and woman" be geared toward counseling couples or preparing teens for choosing their partner or partners (if you're a polygamist Christian faith) instead?

The last stance on politics is that it needs to stay out of the schools, churches, and the workplace in most cases AND VICE VERSA! In schools, the PROPs should be listed, but let the students formulate their own opinions. In churches, keep the politics out of the church and allow members of the church to formulate their own opinions. Keep your PROP signs off of church grounds. In the workplace, be respectful of other people's stances. Remember, it's harassment if you force your beliefs on others.