I've been having such a good day and then I heard these incredibly sad news from Maine. A public referendum repealed the state law allowing same-sex marriages. It is so incredibly frustrating to see how many miserable, mean, and retrograde individuals there still are in the world.
I've tried long and hard to understand why anybody would want to prevent other people from enjoying the same rights that one has. How can any reasonable individual be opposed to a couple in love getting married? How can they live with themselves? How do they explain and justify the atrocity of living in the world where their fellow citizens are routinely discriminated against and persecuted? How do they deal with the shame of this situation?
Thankfully, I don't have any anti-gay bigots around me. This is understandable, since I can't imagine being friendly with this kind of hater. Since my world is so different, it always shocks me profoundly to discover how many people are still building their lives around hatred.
1 comment:
More than hatred -- though there's a lot of that, too -- this is about relative status.
People use the oppression of other groups to feel better about their own station. For instance, I believe a lot of racism in the South was and is because of this -- poor whites trying to draw an artificial distinction between themselves and very-similar poor blacks.
Relative status games are an ever-present feature of humanity, it seems.
-Mike
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