If gays are allowed to marry, then straight people will stop having children. Gay marriage will open the floodgates: suddenly, everyone will get married to someone of his or her same sex, and there will be no children to populate the future. As stupid as that argument is, there are a lot of people who seem to believe it. These are the same people who believe that, if abortion is legal, then the government will force people to have abortions regardless of whether they want to or not. They are also the same people who believe that even minimal exposure to evolutionary theory will undermine people’s sense of right and wrong, because, if we are nothing but animals, then we have no choice but to act like animals.
These are examples of all-or-nothing thinking, and this type of mentality is symptomatic of religious fundamentalism. The fundamentalist is unable to understand that not everyone has to live according to the same set of rules; that people can make their own choices in personal matters, and society will not collapse. That is because fundamentalism is about enforcing the beliefs of its adherents on the whole of society. The fundamentalist necessarily sees others as wanting to force their own beliefs on the fundamentalist, because that is what the fundamentalist wants to do to them.
Fundamentalists – fundies, from here on – are stuck in an unenviable psychological dilemma. They are bundles of anxiety, afraid of the world around them. They are unable to deal with social change or with individual freedom – that is, liberalism. Thus, they worry about the gay agenda, or the atheist agenda, or liberal agenda, or even the “Satanic” agenda. All the while, of course, they are members of the only social movement with a real agenda, in the sense that, for them, it truly is all or nothing: agree with them and live by their rules, or – well, there is no “or”.
Take school prayer, for instance. There are no laws prohibiting children from praying in school, whenever or however they want to. Yet fundies are constantly claiming that liberals are trying to prevent Christians from exercising their religious rights in school. What they mean is that they do not want their own children to be able to pray as they want to; they want everyone to pray their way. They want Christian prayer to be mandated and official. To them, that is “religious freedom” – the freedom to believe the way they do.
Fundamentalism is inherently a theocratic movement. Its reaction to social change is not to adapt, but to take control of society and force it to conform to its way of thinking, such as it is. Its only mechanism of ensuring this outcome is organizational control, starting with local school boards and ending with the federal government itself.
Fundies cannot live and let live. They cannot learn to live and let live. The only way that they can do so is by abandoning their theocratic straitjacket.
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