Ichabod's Kin
A place for politics, pop culture, and social issues

I mean knucklehead New Hampshire state Rep Jordan Ulery, and another of his kind, Rep. David Bates, who deem themselves on the side of the Lord in matters marital.

Both are banging drums, waving flags and collecting signatures from the politically dull-witted to challenge the Granite State’s gay marriage law. Hence, signers and pols are the Fools’ Names and Fools’ Faces that, according to trusim, appear in public places, and all eager to determine morality by referendum–meaning to hell with the Constitution or, for that matter, respect for persons.

Gays justifiably have grievous wounds from all attempts to make them second-class citizens, and Bates, Ulery & Co. have the salt to rub in. The Inquisition were fun folks of the same ilk. And it’s all worded in high-flown language, as if they were God’s proposed amendments to the Ten Commandments: “Resolved,” (don’t you love that word in the mouths of the impertinent?) “…citizens…be allowed to vote on an amendment…that defines marriage.”

Certainly!–we could have done the same with Civil Rights in the day of King, Jr. and still be a racist-led country of de facto segregation, and never having heard of Michael Jordan, let alone Barack Obama and, well, you get the idea.

But Ulery, bless his demented soul, has a mouth to match and was heard to tell the media that “there are a lot of people who are very angry” about gay marriage. At last, in a fit of extreme toleration I put myself in his shoes and tested his words–realizing he was also among those who say that gay marriage insults and harms their very straight and legal wedlock.

I asked myself: how does the marriage of people of other sexual nature and preferences hurt mine? I checked everywhere, under every rock of hearth and home, not to mention my social circles; my image in the mirror and recent photos of spouse and me together to see what may have changed in our appearance (maybe, like Berenger in Ionesco’s play, “Rhinoceros,” we’re becoming, unawares, like certain vile people–as gays supposedly are wont to be–who inhabit our little world that began so happy and hetero in the Garden of Eden). I even cast a jaundiced eye on our eating habits, clothes styles, reading material and religious views; the way we interacted; our sexual habits and practices.

And here’s what I found: Not a damn thing. Not a besmudge or besmear on who and what I and we have been for all these years. So how do other people’s marriages “insult” mine? The big news is that nothing can hurt our marriage unless we let it, or cause it ourselves. What does somebody else’s home and bedroom have to do with ours? Mine certainly doesn’t infect theirs.

Of course, my objections have nary an influence on jokers like Bates and Ulery. In truth, they wouldn’t listen to Jesus Christ. So I introduce into evidence, in this esteemed court of decency, a witness: Ted Olson, lifelong Republican, vet of the Reagan and Bush war rooms, former Solicitor General, advisor to those who impeached Clinton and winner of Bush v. Gore that brought George W into the White House (and widower of the Barbara Olson who went down on a highjacked 9/11 plane). The clincher is that he’s now an advocate of invalidating California’s Prop 8 that overturned the constitutional right to marry a person of the same sex.

Olson is the odd card in otherwise perfect hands that right-wingers are dealing themselves in the gay-marriage controversy. He’s the Four of Clubs in what they thought was a promising royal straight in Hearts. Read what he said in the Jan. 18 Newsweek; I have space only to summarize: a) that same-sex marriage is an American value; b) that those who oppose gay marriage have “ultimately false perceptions about our Constitution and its protection of equality and fundamental rights;” c) that marriage is “a stable bond between two individuals who work to create a loving household and economic partnership;” and d) he does “not believe that our society can ever live up to the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness until we stop this invidious discrimination.”

I’m tired of people like Ulery saying he’s offended by gay marriage. I’m offended by his marriage, or his idea of it as the province of rectitude–the difference being that I don’t want to deny or reverse his, or collect signatures to do so.

I’m miffed by some ugly changes in this part of the American Republic. Years ago, elsewhere, I was one who “voted for Johnson and got Goldwater.” For those unborn at the time, or sleeping soundly, a vote for LBJ was to keep Barry from being the Mad Bomber in southeast Asia, only to have Johnson win and it was “Bombs Away!” anyhow.

Today, I thought a move to New England was to the garden of sense and sensibility, only to find too much Southern backwater mentality. So I thank lucky stars for people like Ted Olson. I guess there really is a god; thankfully it’s not Bates’ or Ulery’s.