Motley Moose – Archive

Photo Credit: Victor Hugo Pinilla-Coxe (my friend)

I moved to Utah 27 years ago, end of May 1987.  I already knew a few LGBTQ people, mostly from college and campus ministry, and a couple in my small home town.  AIDS was still kind of new, and scary.  My church has long welcomed everyone, and I had friends: they were a lesbian couple with two adopted children.  

Equal marriage was a fantasy, barely on the radar.  Mostly, I wanted my friends to be safe, and able to have jobs & places to live.  I moved away, back, away again, and finally back 16.5 years ago.  

Back when he was a student at Harvard, Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) wrote a piece detailing what he described as women’s greatest fear and the solution to help ease that fear (h/t The Huffington Post).  This conclusion and its basis?

Cotton, who is unmarried, wrote that he surveyed several women — whom he referred to as “Cliffies,” or female students at Radcliffe — and they all told him the same thing: that their “greatest fear” in life was to be left by their husbands, and their “deepest hope” was to be “a good wife and mother.”

And Cotton’s proposed solution?

Make divorce harder through the elimination of no-fault divorce and the promotion of covenant marriage.

His reasoning?

This will help ease women’s greatest fears, stop the ‘problems’ caused by no-fault divorce and keep men in line.

Just a heads up about some news here in the UK which should give those campaigning for equal same sex marriage rights some hope. (I’ll quote from my impending Daily Beast piece and link when the whole thing is published early tomorrow)

By a resounding majority of 400 votes to 175 the House of Commons voted on Tuesday night for the second reading of a bill according equal rights same sex couples.  The government sponsored bill represented an overwhelming victory for those campaigning for gay marriage – a victory many didn’t expect to see in their lifetime. But how did the UK, which often lags behind the US on civil liberties, manage to steal another march on gay rights?

UPDATE: link to the Full Daily Beast article

This was posted on the Moose in November, 2008. I decided to repost it after reading about today’s announcement of President Obama’s mandate on hospital visits. Hopefully, the scenario in the story will now be a thing of the past.

Friday, April 16, 2010

President Obama mandated Thursday that nearly all hospitals extend visitation rights to the partners of gay men and lesbians and respect patients’ choices about who may make critical health-care decisions for them, perhaps the most significant step so far in his efforts to expand the rights of gay Americans.

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The Death of a Love Story

Life is often like a smooth flowing stream. Day follows day with only small ripples to disturb the surface and then, unexpectedly, a large rock breaks the current. Sometimes that rock is more like a surging rapid and at other times, it takes a sudden plunge over a waterfall. We have little control over the current. We can only ride out whatever the stream brings our way.

When Jim and Reggie awoke on that quiet Wednesday morning, life seemed tranquil and serene. As on any other weekday, Jim prepared for work while Reggie set the table for their shared breakfast routine. There was little to indicate that this day would be any different from the days that had come before it. Unfortunately, unknown to this loving couple, a waterfall loomed ahead.

Reggie, as a self-employed writer, spent the day in front of a computer while Jim went to work as an accountant at a large corporation. The two loving partners had played out this same routine for nearly thirty years. They both agreed that life had been good to them.