Yup, the crazies are out there.

via Sociological Images: Seeing is Believing

Well, at least one crazy is out there. (FYI, Culver is the Governor of Iowa.) However, there are several problems with the sign.

One is the grammar.

SAME SEX

ANIMALS

DONT MATE

GOD BLESS

CULVER MAN

UP

Okay, I'll give the man the necessity of writing in all-caps, since visibility is important. However, the lack of punctuation? Seriously, if you are going to make a sign to be seen in public, you should use better grammar than that. Also, the lack of punctuation makes the second part of the sign a little ambiguous. Does is it supposed to read, "God bless Culver man up" or "God bless. Culver, man-up!" In the former, it would be some sort of English patois-based statement asking God to "bless-up" "Culver man". However, I doubt that the sign is meant to be some sort of patois, therefore, I will assume here that it is the second case. So, before moving on, I will assume that the sign is supposed to read thusly: "Same-sex animals don't mate. God bless. Culver, man-up!"

Now that I have gotten that out of the way, let's look more closely at the first sentence: Same-sex animals don't mate. Ummm... but they do. Ummm... here are birds-of-more-than-a-feather that "flock" together, and there is documented evidence from over 500 species of homosexual mating. So the first premise is patently wrong. The man is holding up a sign written in bad grammar (which itself confuses and denigrates his own message) that begins with what is either a blatant lie (assuming that he knew the evidence to the contrary) or proof of his blatant ignorance (assuming he didn't know of the evidence). Not a good start there...

Moving on to "God bless", I have to ask to whom this statement is made. Is it a statement that relates back to the previous untrue sentence, is it a general statement, is it asking for a blessing for the Governor, or is it something else? If it is the first, then is the man asking that God bless a patently false statement? If so, then to what end? To hope that God would make the patently false statement somehow true, either by changing the nature of scientific observation or by asking to be brought under God's coattails (and the perceived social benefit that such a request brings)? If it is the second, why tuck it between a blatantly false statement and a demand that the Governor somehow "man-up"? Wouldn't it work better (logically) at the end of the sign as a courteous (or ironic) closing salutation? If it is the third, then to what purpose? (I will explore some possible options of "man-up" in the next paragraph.) Finally, if it is for some other reason, it is as clear as mud to me.

Moving on to "Culver, man-up!" Gwen at Sociological Images makes and forwards good points:

The Culver being told to “man up” is Iowa’s Democratic governor. Joshua says,

I just think it’s kind of telling that Culver is being urged to preserve the traditional definition of marriage with the phrase “man up.”  Only by tapping into honest masculinity can Culver fend off effeminate men and mannish women who want to marry each other…

It is a great example of the assumption that masculinity automatically includes homophobia; being a “real man” means not just being straight, but being opposed to gays and gay rights.

Apart from that, I had always thought that the phrase, "man-up!" meant that I was supposed to pair-up against someone in basketball, playing man-on-man defense. However, I think it is supposed to mean something closer to the various initial definitions found in urbandictionary.com. If that is the case, then is the man asking the Governor of Iowa to usurp power from the state's Supreme Court? If that is the case, then is the man asking for the governor to be an autocrat? I somehow doubt that, since if Gov. Culver takes autocratic power, I would think that this man (and many others in the state) would not be very happy about it. Okay, maybe he's not asking the governor to become an autocrat. Maybe he's asking the governor to make a statement against the state's Supreme Court decision. If the governor does that, then what? Such a statement would only be a political statement that would not really help in Culver's re-election, since (unless Iowa is different from the rest of the country) it is likely that more people who support the Supreme Court decision would be those who would try and re-elect Culver.

Now, this is just one example of a protester making an argument that doesn't address the decision of the Supreme Court. He is a private citizen, and not a person in political power. ... but Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars shows that legislators can also be quite ignorant (blissfully or otherwise) of the Supreme Court decision vs. the rhetoric (okay, it's one legislator in this case, not many).

This sort of backlash - although an inevitable part of any social change - is annoying. I understand that it will be there, and I feel it when certain "truths" I take for granted are questioned, but open-mindedness is not a selfish thing.