I saw the picture and I thought, "Wow, this paper's gone a long way, baby." Talk about favorable media coverage. At least, that was what I thought until I read the editorial.
Yes, it was sort of about Wesy's case, but the gag order supposedly in place sort of confined the discussion. The gist of it was that our lawmakers have to start confronting gay issues, that public opinion is not unanimous on homosexuality, that in the Middle East, gay men get "wasted," (with a cute aside that the reader has to figure out what "wasted" means), blah blah blah. But, while the general tone wasn't so bad (note the qualifier!), a couple of sentences were, well, disquieting.
(As if anything could get more disquieting than the thought of gay men in the Middle East getting wasted. And I don't mean what happens to smooth Asian boys after accepting sexual propositions from rich Arab men).
What was really troublesome for me was a couple of lines inserted somewhere in this editorial. These lines proclaimed "we do not advocate same sex marriages" and that "the notion itself is revolting."
Now, I don't know who "we" was supposed to be, but for sure that didn't include me. I'm fairly certain that despite my hectic Christmas schedule of receiving gifts and recycling them to people who (hopefully) won't realize I've just foisted a sneaky act on them (in the lofty purpose of saving myself from certain Yuletide bankruptcy), nobody from the paper ever contacted me to ask me about my views on gay marriage.
Of course, that presumes I really should have been included in a survey - who knows - the editorial might just have intended to use the royal "we," although I don't know of anyone with pretensions to bloodlines reaching as far back as the Spanish monarchy. At least, not in this paper. (As for other papers, well, let's not name names, shall we? And this time, I do mean the royal we.)
So assuming I was indeed made a respondent in the survey, my answer to the question on whether I'm for gay marriage would have been: "Hell, yeah!" (The invocation of hell is to satisfy all those who just wished eternal fire and brimstone damnation on me. So save it, I already know what your reaction is.)
Not that I'm saying I want to be married to a man. I'm just saying if two people want to get married, regardless of their sex, they should be allowed to. If they say they're in love and want to spend the rest of their lives with a significant other, why not? Better that, than that British-Jewish woman who got married to a dolphin last week.
And as to whether the notion of gay marriage is revolting, I don't think so, unless the intent of putting Elton and David's pics on the front page was to make sure the entire subscriber base of The Freeman gags over their breakfast cereal.
I actually think the notion's cute, what with, you know, visions of two guys in tuxes simultaneously marching down the aisle, both guys trying to decide which one gets carried over the threshold, no ripping of gowns to worry about, just the simultaneous unzipping of oh well, you get the picture.
So, just to assure the couple of friends who violently reacted last month, I don't think the paper's "official" stance is anti-gay marriage. I'm sure it's not the paper, just one of the editor's personal opinion. Were it the official stance of this paper, there wouldn't be any reason for me to be here, what with my years and years of columns dedicated to civil liberties in general, and women's and gay rights in particular.
Of course, if my column suddenly disappears from this paper, I guess you'll already know why. (Kidding!)