What's it to you?

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms.

- Justice William O. Douglas

Got home last night and watched the local news, and there was a rally downtown against California's passage of Proposition 8, which seeks to end gay marriage. This being 3,000 miles from California, it must be that people are realizing that a threat to their freedom from far away can become much closer if action is not taken. Much as I love several people in California, we must remember that many people out there thought that sending Sonny Bono to the US Congress was also a good idea.

One of the rally participants was a woman I used to work with, who has been with her partner for years and years. They are as solid a couple as any I have known, and they ought to have the right to live legally as a married couple, enjoying all the rights and privileges appertaining thereunto. Lee and Michele went to Vermont and were married (or participated in a civil union, whatever the term is legally) when that state realized that people had the right to choose whom to pair up with.

I care so much about this topic that I am not even going to try to noodle out how to end the preceding sentence without a preposition at the end. Hell, I might even split an infinitive when I really get to frantically type about this.

See what I made me do?

I know that you can find in the Bible a passage about it being an abomination for a man to lie with a man. While you're thumbing through your copy to find that verse, I'll show you the one about Thou Shalt Not Kill, and ask if you supported this Iraqi genocide, and then we'll lose sight of the original argument.

There are people who believe that a woman could be president of the United States, but can't be the preacher down at the little church on the corner, because the Bible tells that men are in charge of everything, and woman shall cleave unto a man, and where does all this cleaving leave us?

I really doubt that there is much on which I will agree with Caribou Barbie here,

because she represents that narrow-minded stoniness that has kept so many people so miserable for so many years. But she has the right to her own opinions and actions, and what's it to me where she goes to church or how she raises her kids or how many times she trots out that tired old "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" line? It's only when people wish to take their opinions and be sworn into public office with an agenda of suppression that I have to raise my hand.

You know I love that good old classic country music...like Faron Young's song from 1960 "A World So Full of Love (With Not Enough To Go Around)." It could be a world full of love for everyone who wants some love, if we could just learn to let people love whom they wish.

Oh no! cry the nay-sayers! We don't care if they're together, y'unnerstan', but they can't get married because, well, a marriage is between one man and one woman. Or, between David Duchovny and a veritable phalanx of arousal sources, or between Madonna and her next one, or Britney Spears in some Vegas Hillbilly high school boyfriend hotel weekend package marriage. How many straights hide behind marriage to cover infidelity, spousal assault and other forms of abuse, and who's calling them out on that?

Think of it this way - why should two people who commit to each other not be able to cover one another under insurance, sign for each other's surgery in a hospital, and have other family values just because they don't happen to be of opposite genders?

Think of this, too, when you watch Humphrey Bogart valiantly struggle against both juvenile crime and excess sibilance in "Knock On Any Door" - drive down the street in your neighborhood - or yours - or yours - and what do you think is going on behind closed doors? You don't know, because the people behind those doors have a right to privacy. As Oscar Wilde said it, as long as they aren't scaring the horses in the street, who cares who does what with their lover?

If you really have the time to worry about someone else's sex life, I say you have time that you could use elsewhere. Go volunteer someplace and quit worrying about others.