Peggy Scott’s heart breaks for the state of Minnesota.
Thing is. Okay, yeah, maybe this is a divisive issue. But the fact is, the people pushing for gender-neutral marriage laws are not the ones who started that; it was the people at the ironically-named “Minnesotans for Marriage” and their political allies who started a major push to try to raise awareness of how horrible gay people are and how damaging it would be to our society to treat them like consenting adults, or admit that they exist in front of our children.
And that was what was divisive. All that hostile rhetoric? Divisive. A state in which whether or not you are legally kin to the person you’ve been with for twenty years and raised kids with depends on what’s in your pants? That’s divisive. Fixing it? People will complain, but then they’ll discover, as David Frum did, that actually the fears about gay marriage are baseless, and life will go on. And we will be less divided.
No, Ms. Scott, this isn’t heart-breaking. This is repairing a thing which has been heart-breaking all along, only it’s only been heart-breaking to people who aren’t like you enough for you to care about them or their lives.
You want heart-breaking? This is what heart-breaking news about marriage equality looks like. We’re moving away from that. If it breaks your heart to imagine that we would move away from these sad things and replace them with happy things, well. That’s more about you than it is about the rest of this.
I do note that we’re still seeing a lot of rhetoric about “Biblical” notions of marriage. When I hear these coming from someone who considers it valid for a man to kill a 14-year-old girl’s entire family, then take her to be his wife whether she wants to or not (but she has to be allowed to mourn them for a while, and cannot thereafter be sold into slavery), I disagree with them. When I hear them from someone who doesn’t consider that valid, I consider them offensive and frankly blasphemous. It is not your place to impose American ideals of the 1950s on the Bible.