Love got lost along the way

After reading the latest round of gay marriage lamentations in The Press I went into my garage to check something. Yup, there it was. A sign. One of hundreds, perhaps thousands that were distributed 10-15 years ago. You could find them in yards and businesses all over the county. Most of my friends and associates displayed them. A nice, campaign quality sign with a silk-screened image of our state and the words, "Idaho the Human Rights State." I stood there and looked at it for a few minutes, wondering what happened.

Living here all my life, I've always taken pride in our sense of community and positive attitudes. A friendly, welcoming type of town. Well, we used to be anyway. Things sure have taken an ugly turn over the years.

The most recent and glaring example of the How Angry Can Our Community Get Award is with the gay marriage issue. And we have the poor owners of the Hitching Post itching to sue the City over it. I can understand a business owner refusing to accept customers for obvious reasons. Reasons like nobody covered in pig slop should get a seat in a restaurant reasons. But to deny service to someone based on their personal and private life, well, that doesn't make sense to me at all.

The Knapps are in the business of marrying people (although they're the first people I've ever heard of who are against a boost in their own business). I think it's safe to say the majority of the customers they get are in one of two categories. Speed and convenience is the first; their location just a couple hundred feet from where couples get their marriage license. The other would be that the happy couple doesn't want a religious ceremony, probably because they are not religious. So, get your ticket, cross the street and get it punched. How easy is that? The Hitching Post is the closest you can come to a drive-thru wedding without being in Vegas.

But maybe this is the new preferred way to get married in Idaho. One of my favorite stats is that Idaho now rates, per capita, No. 3 in America for people who've been married three times or more. Yes indeed, the sanctity of traditional marriage is alive and well in The Gem State.

So the Knapps have been running a marriage mill for years and now all of a sudden they have a problem with marrying people based on their own religious beliefs? Now they do. I wonder how many pregnant brides they've married. Or weddings of "convenience." Or third, fourth or fifth weddings. Or brides with a black eye. Or "shotgun" weddings (we do so love our guns in Idaho). But they've got to draw the line somewhere. And since people can hide their homophobia behind religion, well, there ya go.

Here's a solution for the Knapps. Hang a sign in your front window that says, "We Hate Queers." In rainbow colors of course. And feature it in your advertising and on your webpage. If you make your feelings well known I doubt that any of those dang homos will give the Hitching Post a second thought. Problem solved. Save your legal fees.

It's not like people don't have other options. Heck, I marry people and have a certificate to prove it. And rather than in a brick pillbox, I perform weddings in backyards, parks, beaches, wherever a couple wants. I also work with the couple to create vows that are meaningful to them, not just some template wham-bam-now-you're-married-will-that-be-cash-check-or-credit vows. And I look forward to doing so with my first gay couple as well.

I'm an agnostic and don't have much use for organized religion. But I've been married for 37 years and I do fully believe in something called love. The only wedding virtues I "preach" to a couple are of unconditional and mutual respect and support. And isn't that what marriage is all about? That and love? And who would I be to tell a couple in love that theirs is a "sick, unnatural" love? To tell them there is a certain stink about them? A stink so bad that I couldn't possibly marry them. What would that make me?

Sadly, we already have folks in our community who seem to make that their mission, or hobby. Like it's any of their business.

Love is beautiful. Religious persecution is not. If America is truly the Land of the Free, why do some Americans want to dictate what freedoms their fellow Americans can and can't have? If you want to hate people, then stand up and say so. Be honest and take pride in it so we know who you really are. But stop using God as your reason. It makes religion look exactly the opposite as you think it does.

"Reverend" Dave Walker is a Coeur d'Alene resident and former City Council member.