It's 41 degrees in Minnesota. The snow is melting. It will, probably near the end of the week, be gone as the weather slowly, painstakingly warms and the rains move in. To be at the end of March and still see snow everywhere...to have the roads artificially narrowed by the mountainous detritus left behind by the city's army of snowplows...it makes me wonder why the hell I moved here. Even though I know I had good reasons.
First and foremost among the reasons I had were the people. Yeah, I liked them, but there was something about the quality of their minds that excited and stimulated me. Certainly, all my friends all over the country fall into that category. Up here I'm often dazzled by the impressive concentration of intelligence.
In Minneapolis I have the priveldge of knowing many people who I like quite alot. Being as I am a gregarious loner, the number of folks that I hang out with regularly is quite small. One among that number is Matthew Foster.
He is brilliant and talented. He had a commentary published in the Star-Tribune. As anyone who has read this blog for a while knows I am, as a heterosexual male who happens to revere the US Constitution, appalled and embarrased by the move to outlaw gay marriage. I am offended by this movement at all levels, but particularly so when it is applied to any state Constitution and to the US Constitution. To turn those documents into screeds that limit rights is an affront to every principle of America that I hold dear. I do not understand it. On most emotionally charged issues I can easily see the logic or validity of positions that are in opposition to mine. On this issue I am simply incapable of understanding how America and Americans can advocate singling out citizens for second class status for no reason other than, as near as I can deconstruct the anit-gay arguments, the thought of boys kissing makes them feel icky.
As a nod to ettiquette I include the link. But it is a fine enough piece of writing that hits home with me with such a wallop that I include (apologies to the Strib) the entire text below...
Matthew Foster: Kersten can take comfort that life's already tough for gays
All a same-sex marriage amendment would do is push gay families back into the closet.
Matthew Foster
Reader's rep Kate Parry tells us that the Star Tribune's metro
columnists are provocative and arouse strong reactions, and that this
is good, because being provocative is somehow a mark that someone's
making me think. Or at least that was the reasoning.
Nonsense.
In
her March 16 column, Katherine Kersten points to a Canadian government
report that recommended legalizing polygamy. Her reasoning was that
after allowing gay couples to marry, Canada is falling down a slippery
slope to all sorts of awful twists of marriage.
Unfortunately,
she forgot to mention in her column that the report recommended not a
legalization of polygamy in Canada, but the recognition of foreign
polygamous marriages performed outside Canada. The thrust of the report
was that the women who share a husband (and the children of those
women) are afforded no redress in the Canadian system when their
husbands abuse them or leave them without child support. There was
never an intention to perform polygamous marriages in Canada, and there
never will be. The report's authors just wanted to make sure the most
vulnerable people were protected when they landed on Canadian shores.
Kersten
then quoted a New Jersey judge who said gay marriage would lead to a
Pandora's box of unimaginable horrors visited upon American
heterosexuality. While many judges have used hysteria as reasoning --
most famously, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the Bowers case
-- it is, in fact, faulty. The New Jersey judge was ruling against
same-sex marriage, so it only stands his imagination was running wild.
After all, in the absence of reason, fantasy is allowed to bloom. No
ruling issued by a judge in favor of same-sex marriage has left an
opening for polygamy or, indeed, for any further slope on which
marriage could slip.
An opinion is no longer valid if it's based
upon half-truths -- or it should be labeled as "gut instincts" or
"stuff I believed and did a Google search to reinforce." In her columns
about same-sex marriage, Kersten repeatedly leads readers to believe
that, unless Minnesotans outlaw gay marriage this fall with a
constitutional amendment, gay marriage will suddenly become legal. It
will not. It is illegal now and will remain illegal. What the amendment
offers is simple: political division, legal redundancy and social
uselessness. In short, it is a waste of the Legislature's time and
taxpayers' money.
Kersten can take comfort that life is already
difficult for gay families. Custody issues, child support, hospital
visitation, inheritance rights -- not one is automatically granted to
Minnesota's gay citizens in the way it's automatically bestowed on
Minnesota's straight citizens. The only thing this amendment would
accomplish is to push gay people and their families back into the
closet. The only thing that it does is prevent any legal recognition --
likely including private contracts between two same-sex partners, not
to mention civil unions -- of gay families. It solves the problem of
the (perceived) majority's discomfort at the lives of a tiny minority.
Which is what Kersten is really getting at.
For
proof, all you have to do is read her columns. She never mentions that
gay people are her neighbors, or that we're Minnesotans, or citizens of
the United States. We're somehow pushed out of that -- we somehow don't
exist in her world, much less in close proximity. She crafts her
arguments to show that straight people are the real Minnesotans, the
true Americans, and that gay people are somehow, in some way, not part
of society.
When all the out-of-context quotes and selective
facts are stripped away, it is perfectly clear what her real motivation
is: Kersten, like her allies in the Legislature, simply, unequivocally
believes heterosexuals are better than homosexuals. Straight is
preferable to gay. We're not as good, so we don't deserve full
citizenship. And wouldn't life be better if we queers would shut the
hell up and keep it to ourselves?
I don't agree with those who have accused Kersten of bigotry. I think what her writing displays is chauvinism.
Matthew Foster, Minneapolis, is a Web designer.
