Same-sex marriage rights seem to be the only thing on my mind right now, but it's not terribly surprising, since it's a major news issue at the moment...

For example, earlier today I was visiting with my mom and sister (we had met with my older sister and niece and had a wet weather "fieldtrip" to Ikea, my first time, quite a store), and we went into a Starbucks, so my mom could get some coffee, and I took a look at the local Palo Alto newspaper, and of course it's a font page story that a thousand people will have been married in San Francisco over this long weekend, with hundreds being turned away because City Hall is simply overwhelmed!! (I had to blink back tears again!)

People have come from other cities and other states, waited hours and hours in line, and are ready to camp out on the sidewalk, just to make a public declaration of a loving committment that others can do so easily any day of the week in any city in the country. It's just so absurdly ironic... People are lining up to uphold the marriage institution by joining it, and some fools want to "protect" it by turning them away! What are they so afraid of? As I've read a number of conservatives say, can gays possibly make any more of a mockery of marriage as a serious institution than straights already have?!

And yet here is a quote from a random conservative, writing to a US Senator, that sounds like so many other conservative claims, and yet makes no sense at all...

"The traditional definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman must be preserved, for the sake of our nation's families and our nation's future."

My response: Or what??! Just what the hell is it you fear-mongerers think is going to happen if gays and lesbians get married? How is society going to be anything but better and more stable for it?! One thousand same-sex couples have been married in San Francisco this past weekend. Whether or not their marriage certificates eventually get voided by some court decision, for right now, they have marriage certificates, and they have had the same chance to make public their committment that straight people get every day of the year.

And has the world ended? Has California or San Francisco dropped off into the ocean? Has God smote Gavin Newsom? Have the city's children suddenly morphed into some crazed, depraved, heathens destined to carry out the destruction of the human race? Has everyone in San Francisco suddenly forsaken heterosexual sex and reproduction? (I think my sister and brother-in-law and niece who are redecorating and shopping and excitedly awaiting the birth of my new nephew Gordon would be shocked to hear that!) :P

It's all just so ridiculous! People predicted that interracial marriage, and the end of slavery, and women ordained as ministers, and the teaching of evolutionary biology, and women voting, and black people voting, and women working, and who knows what else(!) would bring about the end of human civilization, and yet here we are, driving SUVs, writing weblogs, drinking lattes, sending rovers to Mars, occupying other countries, and using way more than our fair share of the Earth's resources here today in the good ol' USA. It's amazing how life goes on despite every so-called threat to the foundations of human civilization...