Bonding
Published 20 years, 9 months pastThere’s something about this picture that really works for me—there’s joy and hope and melancholy all wrapped up together, and that’s a mix I can rarely refuse. It’s available as a 16″ x 20″ poster from Cafépress, and I’m seriously considering making the purchase. If you like the image, or if you support the cause to which all proceeds will go, then get on over there and buy it!
Personally, I do support the cause benefiting from sales of the poster, which is to resist any attempt to amend the United States Constitution to ban same-sex marriages. I primarily support that cause because in my view, there’s no good reason why the subject of who can or can’t be married should be a part of the Constitution, amended or otherwise. I mean, if we’re going to start amending the Constitution to prohibit behaviors we don’t like, then when do I get my amendments banning civilian ownership of vehicles that get less than 30mpg on the highway, poorly formed HTML markup, and televangelists? And if those seem silly, how come my dislikes are less worthy of being Constitutionally enshrined than somebody else’s?
Beyond that, I’m generally supportive of what’s happening in San Francisco, at least in a general sense—I’m not sufficiently informed about the specific legal situation in California to have an opinion about the legalities, but the fundamental purpose is A-OK with me. Because as longtime readers (all four of you) can probably guess, I see no reason why homosexual couples should have any less ability to marry than heterosexual couples. I once was friendly with a couple who had been together twelve years, wore marriage bands, and had thrown a ceremony in which they exchanged the bands. The works, pretty much. Yet they couldn’t get married, legally speaking. They were a far better example of loving pair than a lot of hetero couples I’ve known, and yet they could never be spouses. You might be wondering… were they male or female? It doesn’t matter. Which is, I think, sort of my point. It isn’t original, but I thought it was worth repeating.
Especially since we now have a new federal appeals judge in place, one who said that homosexual acts are comparable to “prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and pedophilia.” I’m sorry, but if you can’t perceive a difference between activities engaged in by consenting adults and, say, an action perpetrated by a person upon a corpse or an animal, then you aren’t intellectually qualified to sweep the floor of the federal appeals court, let alone sit on it.
Deep breath. Move on.
I guess Saturday was a day for talking about aggregator experiences; in a post made that day, Meryl put forth a different perspective on the topic than I did, and at about the same time. I agree with Meryl that an aggregator that can present a styled article should provide the option of disabling that behavior, and just delivering the text content. I just suspect that she and I would have different settings for that preference.