[Vision2020] For Some, Same-Sex Marriage Is Not Politics, It’s Personal

Tom Hansen thansen at moscow.com
Tue May 15 09:57:47 PDT 2012


It is really quite simple, Wayne.  (I may have conveyed thus in an earlier posting . . . ALOT earlier).

The most wonderful part of my life has been the last 38 years (39 in June), that portion of my life that I have shared, and will continue to share, with my soul mate.

For somebody to deprive any two people from sharing and experiencing that same feeling is simply WRONG!

As a wall plaque (that I gave to my spouse when we got home on March 9th) says . . .


Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"If not us, who?
If not now, when?"

- Unknown



On May 15, 2012, at 9:39, Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> May 15, 2012
> For Some, Same-Sex Marriage Is Not Politics, It’s Personal
> 
> By HELENE COOPER and JEREMY W. PETERS
> 
> WASHINGTON — Some of their best friends turned out to be gay.
> 
> Or a daughter (Dick Cheney). Or a close pal (Jon M. Huntsman Jr.). Or a couple seated close by (the Maryland lawmaker Wade Kach).
> 
> President Obama’s embrace of same-sex marriage rights last week instantly touched off speculation about the possible political implications, but that misses a more nuanced point. Like so many other Americans in recent years, politicians are less influenced by party, faith or color on the question of favoring greater legal protections for gays, both liberals and conservatives say.
> 
> Instead, it’s more personal.
> 
> “If you don’t know anyone who’s gay, then it’s an alien lifestyle,” said Theodore Olson, the former solicitor general for President George W. Bush who supports same-sex marriage. But, he added, when “you realize that that’s Mary from down the street, she’s a lesbian and she’s with Sally, what would it be like if they couldn’t be together?” people come around.
> 
> During the civil rights movement, many white Northerners — including some who had never before interacted with black people — joined African-Americans to fight for the principle of equal rights, often opposing white Southerners who had lived among blacks all their lives yet saw nothing wrong with the separate but equal statutes. Principle seemed to come before the personal in many cases.
> 
> With the gay rights movement, it often seems that the opposite applies. While there are many people who support gay rights because it is in line with their personal or political views, for many others, their approach on the issue is experiential, and comes down to a simple issue: knowing an openly gay couple. In fact, it can seem as if there are two Americas when it comes to gay rights: one in which same-sex couples interact regularly with their straight counterparts, helping to soften impressions of homosexuality, and another in which being gay or lesbian remains largely unspoken.
> 
> Take Maureen Walsh. By night, Ms. Walsh runs Onion World, a sausage restaurant in Walla Walla, Wash., with her family. But by day, she is the Republican state representative for a district in the state’s conservative southeastern corner. She said she had no problem with domestic partnerships for same-sex couples. But when it came to marriage, she drew the line. Then she started thinking about her 26-year-old daughter, who recently came out of the closet.        
> 
> “In some selfish way I did think what an affront to my beautiful daughter, who deserves something everybody else has in this country,” Ms. Walsh said in an interview, recalling how her decision to vote yes on the same-sex marriage bill that passed in Washington in February  sprang more from a motherly impulse than from any political or ideological reasoning.
> 
> “It’s selfishness, but it’s motivated by love,” she said. “And I’d rather err on the side of love, wouldn’t you?”
> 
> Then there’s Terre Marshall, a Republican delegate from Hawaii and professional public speaker who once attended a predominantly African-American church in Boulder, Colo., that advocated — as she, too, did then — the traditional view of marriage as between a man and a  woman. About a decade ago, Ms. Marshall received a bombshell: a sobbing telephone call from her best friend and business partner who disclosed that she was lesbian, and that her relationship with a woman who Ms. Marshall had thought was a roommate, not a girlfriend, had just ended.
> 
> “How could I have missed something so important to my closest friend?” Ms. Marshall said.
> 
> Right away, she said, any opposition she had had to gay rights dissolved. “I realized that I could care less about her sexuality. What I cared about was my friend.” It didn’t take long for Ms. Marshall to find her way to supporting gay marriage.
> 
> Even some who once considered homosexuality amoral said they were surprised to discover how quickly their perceptions changed once they were forced to put a face to something they had considered only in an abstract sense.
> 
> Mr. Kach, the Republican state delegate from Maryland, provided a pivotal vote for the state’s legalization of same-sex marriage earlier this year. In an interview, Mr. Kach recalled how not so long ago he became incensed when his local newspaper ran a picture of a gay couple and their child on its front page for a story about Father’s Day.
> 
> “I was just absolutely appalled,” he said. “I didn’t think of them as a couple. I thought of them as people who were engaged in that,” he paused before saying, “the homosexual activity.”
> 
> Then he attended a legislative hearing on same-sex marriage in February. Because he arrived late, he had to sit next to the witness table where he found himself eye to eye with gay couples who were testifying. One was a pastor whose partner was ill with cancer, Mr. Kach said.
> 
> “I’m sitting there watching the one with cancer rub the back of the one who’s testifying,” he said. “I just saw the love and the devotion that they had to one another.”
> 
> Mr. Huntsman, a former Republican presidential candidate and governor of Utah, said his position supporting civil unions hardened in 2007 after the gay partner of a close friend was barred from the emergency room as his friend’s son lay dying after a swing-set accident.
> 
> “You can’t experience something like that without saying, ‘Where’s the fairness?’ ” said Mr. Huntsman, a Mormon, whose religion strongly condemns homosexuality. Mitt Romney, a fellow Mormon, does not support civil unions or gay marriage.
> 
> On Capitol Hill, Representative Nan Hayworth, a Republican from New York who swept into Congress on a wave of Tea Party support, became one of only a handful of Republicans to join the Congressional gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender caucus. Her son is gay. And Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a conservative Republican who represents many gay constituents in a district that spans from Miami to the Florida Keys, became the first in her party to co-sponsor of legislation to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.
> 
> Justice Lewis Powell of the United States Supreme Court was perhaps one of the most famous public figures to come around on gay rights. He voted in 1986 to uphold a criminal sodomy law, telling his law clerk at the time, “I don’t believe I’ve ever met a homosexual.” The clerk, who was gay, replied, “Certainly you have, but you just don’t know that they are.”
> 
> Justice Powell later said that he regretted his vote.
> 
> Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Jeremy W. Peters from New York.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
> art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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