horse of george

status quo - liberals call those who voted in favour of Proposition 8 'intolerant'. Seems obvious, but to reject is not to be intolerant towards even though said rejection insinuates that one finds intolerable certain aspects of the thing rejected. No doubt many who voted in favour did so at least in part because they don't like being told that if they hold a valid opinion in opposition to someone else's possibly valid opinion they are perforce bigots, they no doubt squirm uncomfortably at the notion that there can be only one legitimate view to have on this issue and to not hold that view shames one's soul. The crude equivocations of social activists truly grate: I understand they need people to think about gay marriage in the same ways they do racism and sexism and therefore they have to or feel they have to deploy supercharged language - but the analogies are specious. We talk about equality of the sexes but we would never force men and women to share public toilets, would we? People are too complex to be uniformly categorized under what amounts to an allusive abstraction - concepts lose some or much or sometimes all of their utility at a certain point after exposure to reality. Marriage is not merely a right enabling some lofty concept, it is a vital social artifact whose weighty significance, like burial of the dead, is both practical and metaphorical and deeply rooted in the cultural norms of the Western tradition. Doesn't mean you can't change it - but it does mean if you change it you can't then pretend its meaning remains unchanged. It's not to behave like some ignorant bigot to worry about the consequences of such a change or to wonder if the greater good is not being held hostage by the narrow concerns of a discontented few. In a free and open society we are obligated to hear peoples complaints, render them the respect they are due and then act to address grievances should action be deemed necessary or appropriate - should action be deemed necessary and appropriate - the constitution does not guarantee that one's opinions will be held as self evident truths simply because one holds them.