As I sat down to write a column on a different subject (the IRS getting rid of folks who audit rich people's taxes), I was distracted remembering the banner headline on the front page of a recent Seattle Times: Gay-marriage backers may be out of options!
I am as puzzled by the flap over two men, or two women, getting married as I am by the people who, after six years of George W., still refer to him as a conservative.
I am even more puzzled that this is a big issue for straight people.
Who cares who marries whom?
Well, for one, Jeff Kemp cares. A former second-string NFL quarterback, Kemp, the president of some group called Families Northwest, is quoted in the same newspaper as saying: "Every child has a birthright to a mother and father. The country needs that. The court recognized that."
Kemp's quote shares a page with the story that a jury in Texas just found Andrea Yates, a good Christian woman who got a little off the track and drowned her five children because she was saving them from Satan, was found not guilty by reason of insanity at her second murder trial. According to the story, Yates could be released from jail relatively soon because she is "stable" on her meds.
People who have some belief in the sanctity of the family, in a country where more than 40 percent of marriages now end in divorce, want to protect unborn children from having two daddies and no mommies.
I wonder what the deceased Yates toddlers would say.
Me, I'd take the two daddies even though I am not gay. If I want to swallow water, I'll go swimming.
There's another thing you learn from writing columns. Many people who read forget what they read pretty quickly when they reply to an offending scribe.
Or they leap ahead: "He is defending gay marriage again, he must be gay."
Let me repeat. I am not gay. I just don't give a tinker's dam who is sleeping with anybody else unless they are sleeping with a person I am sleeping with, or trying to sleep with.
And while counseling convicts for the state of Washington for two years, I saw enough people with severe damage done by "good" parents - by which Kemp and his ilk mean simplistic people who believe in the literality they believe in, to know that a parent who loves and respects their child is better than a more conventional type who preaches love and respect but can sometimes be very different behind closed doors.
This is not to say that gays or lesbians are automatically better parents, or better people, than ordinary straight folks. I'm sure there are as many gays who shouldn't be parenting children as there are straights who have been blithely damaging their offspring by passing on their hypocrisy and bigotry for my entire lifetime of observing folk.
All black people of my day knew white people who wanted to be black. Because I married a black woman, I was put in that box for a while until the brothers and sisters who got to know me realized I didn't like most black people any more than I like most white people.
No race, much less a sexual orientation, guarantees a person will be better, nicer, cleaner, sweeter, sexier. No professed religious belief does, either.
Simply being in an alleged majority holding religious group that allow you to castigate people who are different doesn't automatically mean you should be raising anything more intricate than tomatoes.
And I have read the Bible four or five times, so don't start with that.
Purported Christians in this very country used that same book to claim black people were less human than white people for 300 years. Integration, real integration, began (it isn't done yet) in this country at Selma in the mid-'60s.
Tell that "less than human" crap to Jackie Robinson, James Baldwin, Michael Jordan, Jim Brown, Ali or Tiger Woods.
The Bible is a compilation, and as such can be used to make any point: An eye for an eye, say, and turn the other cheek. You pick 'em!
As far as proscribing gay "behavior," there are segments of the Good Book that say women on their period are unclean.
The real issue is what - fear?
Fear of "good" conventional people for something they don't understand?
I have several gay friends. But I didn't choose them because they were gay. I chose them because we had interests in common and met while pursuing those interests (in my case, theater and sports).
As a young Vietnam-era veteran living in New York City pre-AIDS, and pre-the wrinkles in the photo that accompanies this column, I got hit on a lot by gay men. I never responded positively, but I never was enraged, either. What I was was flattered.
I thought, rightly or wrongly, that if the cute young guy at the end of the bar thought I was handsome, the cute waitress who was sneaking a peek occasionally might, in a quieter, more allegedly feminine way, be thinking similar thoughts.
And finally, as a serious loser, emotionally and financially, at the marital game, I don't see why gays and lesbians should be spared the pain and trauma of divorce.
I noted a little picture and article the other day about two women who were the first lesbians officially married somewhere a couple of years ago. In the 2-year-old snapshot they were both slim, both attractive, both wearing pantsuits and both smiling.
Now, two years later, there are no pictures in the newspapers, but I can picture the snarls and the tears, because they are separating, getting unhitched, divorced. Another great union dissolved.
Been there, done that.
Can't see how we can deny our gay and lesbian brethren their modicum of domestic suffering.
Let all marry whom they will, legally, and all this hypocrisy and fraudulent talk about the sanctity of the family be damned.
We are in a war of occupation we started.
We are in a country where 45.8 million people don't have health insurance.
We are in a city being bankrupted by greedy developers and sports-team owners.
I do not care who marries whom, and neither should you.
Amen, my children.
Dennis Wilken's column appears periodically in the Capitol Hill Times. He can be reached at editor@capitolhilltimes.com.[[In-content Ad]]
