The conscience of America

The headline reads "Massachusetts Lawmakers Reject Bid to Stop Same-Sex Marriages". By an overwhelming margin of 157 to 39, men
and women of reason shot down yet another attempt to strip loving gay couples of the rights they've held in the state for the last two years. Thanks, Massachusetts, for once again being the conscience of America - it's comforting to know that there's a place in this NASCAR Nation where things like tolerance and common sense still rule.

And it's a funny thing, isn't it? Two years of legalized same-sex marriages have not brought the Bay State to a crashing halt. The "foundation of... our culture" has not cracked at its core, condemning Massachusetts to the Almighty's inescapable wrath (see: Gulf states). Social order has not dissolved into depraved anarchy in the Bostonian suburbs. Statewide, citizens continue to work and shop, go to school and church, raise families, buy homes, take vacations. According to the Washington Post...

Politicians here credit the weddings themselves with shifting the political momentum, saying their growing ordinariness has defused (sic) some of the opposition.

"The difference is that we have marriage," said state Sen. Jarrett T. Barrios... "We've got a world that hasn't changed."

Imagine that. Folks just carrying on with their normal lives, undamaged and unaffected by the fact that Dan and Bill next door were able to make
a binding commitment to each other, no differently than Pete and Cathy down the block. All in two years' time.

And just like all those other things that once threatened the bedrock of our culture, according to the strident voices of the narrow-minded (you know, things like long hair, and birth-control, and interracial dating), this, too, has simply become what it's really been all along - an everyday, non-
threatening, unencumbered part of a forward-thinking society.

Imagine that.