2008-12-26 My Christmas 2008

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Excerpt

On Christmas Eve, I found myself at the home of a lovely woman. I was having a wonderful time when this woman's son's girlfriend announced that she had voted for Proposition 8. This was said loudly and proudly to the four gay people in the room.

I found myself unsure what to do. Frankly, I was shocked. I tried to pull myself out of the group and the girl came over to explain her position. She thought, "If they let two men marry, they might as well let three or four".

Now this was coming from a girl who was waiting for the father of her daughter to finish Christmas Eve with his two other girlfriends, one of whom he lived with and the other of whom is pregnant. I found it more than a little perplexing that she felt entitled to an opinion about the legal rights of gay relationships.

And any efforts to make her realize that this was not abstract or theoretical but that she had voted to deny rights to people right there in the room only yielded her polygamy response. I finally realized that there was not going to be a rational meeting of minds and settled for the agreement that discrimination is not pleasant to the recipient, regardless of the reasons - though no empathy was present in that concession.

A rational response would be "Can you tell me, specifically, what is wrong with polygamy?" Either there is nothing wrong with it (my opinion -W.), or if there is something wrong with it, and this criticism holds up under scrutiny, then it needs to be examined to see whether gay marriage is or is not wrong in the same way.

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