Way to Go Vermont!

It isn't law yet, but on Friday the Vermont state senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to approve a bill that would legalize same-sex marriage. The full senate will likely debate and vote on it next week. This seems an appropriate action for a state that has as its motto, "Freedom and Unity"

I remember discussing my position on interracial dating and marriage with my art teacher when I attended Crown Point High School in Indiana in 1963. Indiana was once the home of the largest KKK organization in the country and to this day has a lively Klan. Fortunately my teacher was a moderate man who listened respectfully to his students and enjoyed discussing issues with them. He said he disagreed with interracial dating and relationships but told me I had a crusading spirit. My positive support for interracial dating and marriage didn't win me a lot of popularity points with the Hoosier classmates, but I didn't fit in anyway so I didn't much care. I have wondered from time to time what the reaction would have been if I had spoken in support of gay marriage back then. Of course it was an unthought of concept back in that era, or at least I had never heard of it and had never thought about it. I know the idea would have been met with a great deal more resistance and revulsion than interracial marriage. I believe this is because in the mind of your average racial bigot the idea of interracial sex is actually quite titillating. It isn't the sex part, especially since they can imagine a white man with a black woman. It is the marriage part and the black man with the white woman that freaks out racists. After all, one only need consider the amount of rape that was perpetrated by white men against black women throughout the years of slavery to realize that white men shtooping black women has never been a problem for the aforementioned palefaced racists. But same gender sex!! Oy vey! The very act is horrifying to your average manly man homophobe although ninety percent of these same stout buckos will blissfully wank off to a sex scene featuring two comely lasses in a porn flick (statistic is my own fictitious creation). To hear some of the kids I have worked with express themselves, and kids tend to not hold back, there is very little that they find more repulsive than two people of the same gender in an intimate relationship. Men are driven to horrifying acts of violence by their fear of homosexuals. Or their latent attraction. or their fear that they might be attracted and therefore 'queer' themselves. I believe with all my heart that this fear and revulsion of the gay sex act and not some obscure verses sprinkled around in an ancient religious text is the basis for all of this. Once again religious beliefs are the cover, the excuse for hatred. As the Bible was once used(and still is so used) to justify racism, it is used as a bulwark to hide homophobia. Tsk, tsk. WWJD?