I include this recent column on gay marriage from Frank Bruni to say something about not only the difference between liberals and conservatives, but something about myself.
2 Dads, 2 Daughters, 1 Big Day
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: July 20, 2011Even in a city as diverse as New York and a neighborhood as progressive as the West Village, a little kid knows that having two dads is different. Eight-year-old Maeve certainly did.
She knew, too, that the world didn’t see her family exactly the way it saw others. Her dads, Jonathan Mintz and John Feinblatt, could tell.
“She understood that there was something, for lack of a better word, second-class about her family,” Mintz said.
And, as she wrestled with that, her frustration was distilled in a question that she and then her sister, Georgia, 6, began to ask more and more often.
Why aren’t you two married like our friends’ parents?
For a long time Mintz and Feinblatt avoided an answer because, while they didn’t want to lie, they also didn’t want to focus their daughters’ attention on the blunt truth: that New York, like most states, forbade it. So they perfected stalling tactics, asking Maeve and Georgia if they thought a wedding would be fun and whether they envisioned being flower girls and on and on. Anything to keep the conversation happy and the girls from feeling left out.
On Sunday, their family will be at center stage. The first same-sex weddings will take place in New York, and Mintz and Feinblatt are saying their vows at Gracie Mansion, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a longtime friend, will officiate.
I had to stop reading here because I teared up. Why? I suppose it was thinking about the little girls and how a wealthy powerful Republican stepped up to the plate and brought some joy into their lives. I became overwhelmed with an individual doing the right thing. After a minute I proceeded to read
Outside New York there’s less cause for celebration: Twenty-nine states with constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage and plenty of people who interpret a formal validation of same-sex relationships as an assault on “family values.”
As I thought of Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, the pig farmers of Iowa, the wholesale corruption of Christianity and the bastardization of Jesus Christ we have come to call American Evangelicalism, by eyes dried and my fingers caught fire…