Zero-Sum Game. The Perverse Pseudo-Morality Promoted by Grace Church Seattle, The Faust’s & Other Anti-Gay Groups

by pinkagendist

“In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which a participant’s gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participant(s).”

It’s not applicable to all aspects of life, but it’s certainly applicable to time & money, as those are finite resources. When you plan out your day, in most instances, one event will have to take precedence over another. When you budget your monthly expenses, you will most likely have to make choices. If your bonus is used for a new car, it can’t also be used to make home-improvements.

Nowhere is zero-sum game more evident and distressing than in the case of religious institutions. The battle over California’s Prop. 8 cost US$83,000,000. One side was fighting for legal protections for existing relationships. The other side was fighting to ensure that the relationships of members of the LGBT community not be entitled to protections regarding health, inheritance and the basic rights and obligations the law affords heterosexual couples who decide to legally commit to each other.

As John Becker eloquently wrote: “Proposition 8 wasn’t just some random, innocuous ballot initiative — it was a cruel, animus-driven crusade to strip a disfavored minority group of an existing and fundamental right. The campaign to pass it relied on lies and gutter-level fear-mongering, flooding the airwaves with images of smiling children accompanied by ominous warnings about how much they’d be harmed if voters didn’t enshrine marriage discrimination into the constitution.”

Those 83 million dollars could have been allocated to other causes, even very serious causes like disease, hunger or poverty. After all, the USA has 31 million people living on the edge of hunger. The time expended on fighting over what, before the law, is nothing more than a legal contract, was directly and indirectly responsible for a monumental waste of resources.

And this is where people like the Faust’s and Grace Church Seattle come in. Every cent and every minute they spend on their destructive endeavours aimed at marginalizing the LGBT community from society- a process they embark on by mangling logic, spreading nefarious myths and promoting ignorance- is time and money that they do not use for productive causes.

In the past few months Mrs. Faust used an inordinate amount of time for these destructive pursuits. She created a website, for which she paid. She engaged an ‘editor’, she drove members of her circle to participate in her anti-gay propaganda, she made an appearance on a radio show promoting her venture. And the question we’re left with is what sort of ethics or morality is this that impeding two adults from signing a legal contract that only affects the signatories is of a higher priority than assisting those in great distress?

Here is where the magic happens and where they spread this perverse and disgusting vision: