Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Sordid Lives

So this is not meant to be a political kind of site. There’re plenty of those around so there’s no need for me to add my rants to the general maelstrom. But I guess all politics (or any of the politics that matters) is personal and this Marriage Amendment thing hits me close to home and has got me pretty peeved. It offends me for two reasons:

1. It has the potential to cause real harm to people I love (or at the very least, cause them additional legal fees or anxiety over how current legal arrangements are set up) and it benefits ABSOLUTELY NO ONE.

2. It deliberately writes prejudice into the Virginia Constitution, which is bad public policy at the least and an affront to American values at the most. I spent several hours over this past summer studying Thomas Jefferson for a paper I had to do for school and, his somewhat compromised stand on slavery notwithstanding, I have to think this is the kind of thing that, beyond causing him to spin in his grave, might compel him to actual rise up from the ground and cause physical injury to several prominent Virginia politicians.

If you care at all about the psychic state of the world, please vote against this amendment and call all of your friends and neighbors and encourage them to vote against it as well. Thank you.

By the way, I don’t really know anything about the play “Sordid Lives” that RTP is opening tonight but I expect it’ll be a a hoot, particularly with folks like Amy Berlin and Jennifer Frank in it. Though it’s a farce, the title got me thinking about how so many people, ranging from ill informed to criminally ignorant, think that homosexuals by default lead sordid lives. Yeah, all of those middle-aged gay mothers and fathers I know are leaving the kids at home to play with Drano while they go cruise the public toilets. Get real.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this posting -- hopefully others, who are also not political junkies, will see this for what it is and will campaign to vote NO.

And diversity, tolerance, and open-mindedness ARE related to the quality and quantity of the cultural life of the community.