Pacific Views

It's a Mad, Mad World

According to this syndicated Chicago Tribune article, the case of gay marriage in New Mexico has some interesting turns, emphasis mine:

...A rural area along an interstate highway connecting Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Sandoval County became the destination for a mad rush of gay partners Friday, who abruptly left work when they heard media reports that County Clerk Victoria Dunlap, a Republican, was going to issue same-sex marriage licenses, a first in New Mexico.

Dunlap, who left the courthouse before the attorney general's advisory arrived by fax at 4 p.m., said a day earlier that she felt compelled to grant the licenses based upon an opinion she sought from County Attorney David Mathews.

According to the county attorney, state law defines marriage as a contract without explicitly stating gender requirements. He also expressed concern about legal liability by refusing to grant the licenses.

Dunlap endorsed the opinion. "It's going to be across the country and so we wanted to be ahead of the curve," she said.

But Atty. Gen. Patricia Madrid, a Democrat, cited the fact that the state legislature had adopted a license form that requires a male applicant and female applicant. She also noted that the New Mexico Supreme Court has limited marital evidentiary privilege to communications between "husband and wife."

"Thus, in my judgment, no county clerk should issue a marriage license to same-sex couples because those licenses would be invalid under current law," Madrid wrote. ...

And published Friday in a local paper (can't find it online), Walter Cronkite weighed in on the subject of gay marriage in a column entitled "Take same-sex marriage out of politics." In part:

...There are many of us Christians who recall our Sunday-school teachers and later our ministers dwelling upon the sympathy and respect - indeed, the tolerance - for others that, they taught, was basic to our Christian religion. As the prophet Isaiah summed up this need for tolerance: "Come, let us reason together."

We who believe this are compelled to ask: Where is the tolerance, where is the Christian spirit in the effort to criminalize the personal choices of our fellow citizens, personal choices that do not physically threaten others? Where is the Christian tolerance in the conceit of those Christian leaders who dare suggest that they alone can be trusted to properly interpret the lessons of their Bible, and who would impose that belief on this nation's highly diverse peoples by threatening to throw them in jail if they don't agree with the CCR's [ed. Conservative Christian Right] version of God's wishes?

...In the difficult days ahead, the tolerant among us - Republican, Democratic or Independent, Christian, Muslim, Jewish or nonbeliever - are going to have to try to preach another morality, and that is the morality of tolerance.

I hope that column had a big audience for its refreshing perspective.

We've got global warming, massive disease epidemics, a shaky global economy, civil wars and occupations going on, hungry people, eroding crop lands, collapsing fisheries, mass extinctions, and public figures up in arms because gays want to get married.

Out of all those problems, I consider the last one the most serious. It's a gatekeeper problem. The peril that those with power in society will yammer away from their bully pulpits about the most foolish of disputes as the world crashes around our ears. The peril of small and fundamentally unserious people who collect vast reservoirs of influence in order to have big crap-flinging popularity contests. People who think their license to squander is so important that others must go without.

Human beings are clever, adaptable, resourceful, and persistent. All our external problems are within our capacity to correct, and that's never been more true than today, at the height of our wealth and knowledge. But we will never solve them while a horde of little Neros is allowed to command our attention and obedience to petty ends.