I was once told by a wise woman that there are only two things that you can't talk about with others: religion and politics. With either one, you're bound to step on toes and cause arguments that are based in nothing more than personal preference and deep-seated bias. Unfortunately I've always been one to throw around religion in casual thoughts and words - a by-product of my education and interests - and politics, with the recent election, has never strayed far from my tongue.

There is one political topic in particular that doesn't so much sting close to home, as it does perpetuate a subliminal warning of a rights crisis that could annihilate civil liberties. That topic is gay marriage.

Now I am not homosexual, nor have I ever been one to stand up for gay rights in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I never even bothered to stay up on the issue. I always saw this issue as a world away, even as gay rights activists faced off against political conservatives and religious purists. But George W. Bush changed all that.

Bush and company have blurred the line between religion and politics; and in many ways, the war on terrorism is shaping up as the next great Crusade, a Jihad in the truest sense. With his contemplation of a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages, I see Bush's religious views stepping all over the rights of the American people.Firstly, all of your religious leaders are wrong. God is not against homosexuality. The passage in Leviticus (Chapter 20) that started this whole hullabaloo states that "a man shall not lie down with a man as he lies down with a woman." Taken literally, notice that there is no statement about a woman lying down with another woman. This would essentially mean that lesbianism is not against God, nor religion. And why would it be, since it's never in the male nature to turn down seeing two women together; and in the days the scriptures were written, men were allowed to have more than one wife to begin with.

Furthermore, I am tired of hearing people shout out that God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. For all you literal Bible readers, in Hebrew, the word Adam means man, so when it says that God (the word Elohim is used, by the way, which is actually plural) made Adam, it means he created mankind. So hey, you never know... Steve could have been right there beside him.

Even if God were against homosexuality, what could that possibly have to do with America and civil rights. The separation of church and state was meant to protect the rights of the American people to participate in any religion they wish. It was meant to avoid discrimination based on a single religion, and not - as some atheists would have you think - remove religion entirely from the picture.

I used to think that religion should have a deserved place in the minds and heart of politicians and their political actions, just so long as those actions didn't infringe on the rights of others with different religious thoughts.Well, that experiment went downhill.

Bush's injection of religious thought into the political system has shut out many civil liberties based solely on the semantical invocation of the word "morality."

Apparently, little does the president know, that ethics - the philosophical subdivision concerned with morality and action - has varying schools of thought with different methods of determining what is ethical and what is not. His religious ethics could very well be vastly different from other such ethical systems like Utilitarianism or Deontology. In fact, Bush's ethics also seem to contradict many of the principals of John Locke's rights-based ethics, which America was founded upon. It steps all over the notion of liberty.

Strangely enough, Bush has no problem with destroying the ecosystem, an immoral act in many people's eyes; but he sure seems determined to plant a flag in the ass of liberal thought and claim victory for the "moral" people.

Regardless of your stance on the issue of gay marriage, the problem remains in Bush's immediate concern with instituting a constitutional amendment to ban such marriages, as well as civil unions and anything else that resembles a comfortable life for same-sex couples. Doesn't this seem rather extreme?

First of all, isn't marriage a state run institution? Isn't its regulation a part of state's rights? Bush has a lot of nerve sticking his nose in this issue and threatening a constitutional ban. You'd swear that he were trying to squash stem cell research or something. Oh wait... he did that too.

In the land of equal rights for all, not all are equal. Bush has essentially stated that homosexuals are a breed below the human race, much like how in colonial times a slave was worth 3/5th of a person, and not a whole one.

If any president succeeds in such a constitutional amendment, how long will it be before they turn their eyes on other liberal institutions that they feel are "morally" wrong? How long before the rest of us start losing rights because politicians are altering the Constitution instead of just misinterpreting it?