Tag: gay marriage

The truth isn’t always what you want it to be.

So, there’s this video going around of Al Franken (whom I truly admire as one of our more sensible-seeming Senators[1]) taking Tim Minnery–who services in some sort of capacity with the anti-gay Focus on the Family organization–to task for misrepresenting a study about the correlation of the well-being of children and the type of family they come from.

Now I support same-sex marriage, and *love* to see bigots of all stripes get schooled, but I’m not sure Franken is necessarily right on this one.

Specifically, if the study defines a “nuclear family” as a married couple—and you can hear Senator Franken use the phrase “who are married to one another” at 1:59, when he says he is reading the definition the study uses—then Minnery’s interpretation is at least legitimate, and perhaps even more correct: because same-sex couples are not allowed to marry in all but a scant handful of states, they are going to be excluded from the “nuclear family” category in almost all cases.

There may be more to it that’s not in this clip, but in this case, I’m not sure the evidence as portrayed holds up to scrutiny.

fn1. Many years ago, Anne and I were seated at a table adjacent to his in a restaurant in Harvard Square.

Highlights of Free Software Documentation #1

When someone undertakes something for fun, or out of passion or deep commitment, the end result is often, I think, more reflective of them personally.

This is generally true of Free Software, and in the Free Software universe, I think this is sometimes even more true of documentation–you’re not obligated to write it, no one’s paying you, few people enjoy writing docs, so if you’re doing it at all, it’s because you _believe_.

So the writers’ personalities and convictions show through just a little bit more, Like this bit from “Dave Rolsky”:http://autarch.org/ with whom I am slightly acquainted. Contained within “Moose::Cookbook::Basics::Recipe10”:http://search.cpan.org/~drolsky/Moose/lib/Moose/Cookbook/Basics/Recipe9.pod I ran across this gem:

bq. Our Human class uses operator overloading to allow us to “add” two humans together and produce a child. Our implementation does require that the two objects be of opposite genders. Remember, we’re talking about biological reproduction, not marriage.

Brilliant.

Someone should start the First Church of Fabulousness

The only tenet of which should be, “Two people who love each other should be allowed to marry.” Maybe two tenets, the other being, “Be excellent to one another,” which has its plusses, too.

At which point, the opportunity to have same-sex marriages becomes one of religious freedom. To restrict such marriages becomes a first-amendment issue, which carries more weight than equal protection, apparently.

Of course, I would hope that many heterosexual couples would also want to get married in the First Church of Fabulousness–it being fabulous, see–but, you know, they, too, could exercise their right to choice.