Someone asked me today to comment on the passing of Proposition 8 in California.
When we deny the rights we treasure to others, we only diminish ourselves.
— Jack Drescher, in a letter to the New York Times. (thanks, Karina).
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writer. screenwriter. learning person. loves being human.
🙂 Glad to be of service. Thanks to Lluvia, too.
You’re a lot classier than me in every way. And here’s a fine example of one of those many ways: how you select what is truly relevant about a quote. You make your point without collateral damage, no unnecessary guilt. I still allow myself to throw some dirt around. But I’m working on it. I get a feeling I’m on the right track, hanging out with swell role models and all.
I hope the debate around Proposition 8 continues and people come to their senses.
I went to an Overturn Prop 8 yesterday. A good-sized crowd at my City Hall with a mix of people, straight, gay, couples with children, singles and some with signs, some without. And as I joined the rally a feeling came over me that I didn’t expect–one of utter ridiculousness that any of us were having to stand there and beg for what amounts to as a basic human right. And I thought–when is it my turn. When do I get to vote on your marriage, your basic human right and have the opportunity to deny it to you?
Anonymous, isn’t that the fuckin’ truth? When I get deeply angry about these things, that is the place where I go too — when do I get to tell you how to live (whoever “you” is in the equation).
I believe that a blanket moral-absolutist approach to the world is a hallmark of fear and of a certain psychological immaturity. I think that elevating personal truths (morals, worldviews, beliefs, preferences) to the status of absolute fact, and then insisting that those facts are and must be true for every human being who lives, is wrong, wrong, wrong.
But that’s the thing that makes it all so hard. Nicola and I are married in all the emotional and psychological and cultural ways, and don’t believe that we need “permission” to feel that way. The idea that we are not allowed to legally frame our marriage the way that other adults are is both ridiculous and deeply poisonous. But many of the people who look at us and see the downfall of All That Is Good In America are speaking their personal truth. It’s true for them. And the enormous challenge that anyone has when they wish to expand another person’s worldview is to make that person see that personal truth is just that — personal. And that if one person’s personal truth is valid, is real, well, what does that imply about other people’s different personal truths?
Getting people to see the difference between personal truth and Absolute Fact is nothing less than a huge frackin’ paradigm shift. It is done with reason, with emotion, in a flash or one small drop of water at a time, depending on the person involved. It is done with conversation, with anger, with restraint, with public speech and with the most intimate of talks…. it’s a fucking process, and we’re in it.
And at least we’re in it in the culture now, in the country, not just in the privacy of our own souls and families.
Karina, I don’t for a minute believe that being classy has anything to do with it (although I am always delighted to be thought of as classy!)
I think it’s that I feel keenly the passage of time, and I am more inclined to be succinct because I have much to do — this hour, this day, this year, this decade, this lifetime — and all of that time is feeling much too short to me right now.
And so I look for the heart of things.
I don’t always find it — still learning. But for what it’s worth, it’s my years of riffing on everything that have made me learn what is the heart for me. And I know another riffer when I find her (grin).
There is no better or worse in our responses to things. We’re just different. Just another personal truth, so don’t make it absolute, amiga mÃÂa.