Category Archives: General

Mass House Votes to Repeal

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The Massachusetts House of Representatives voted yesterday to repeal the 1913 law that prevents out-of-state couples from getting married in Massachusetts if their home state would bar the marriage. The state senate passed the law a couple of weeks ago, and the governor plans to sign it. Under existing law, same-sex couples can get married in Massachusetts only if same-sex marriage is legal in their home state. Many people think the law was originally passed to prevent interracial marriages. The repeal will allow many more same-sex couples to come to Massachusetts and get married.

Kris Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, said that this House vote is “eroding the people’s right to define marriage.”

It’s funny:

When a court rules that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, the court is apparently infringing on the legislature’s job — even though the court is doing its job under the constitution.

When a legislature votes to allow same-sex marriage, this somehow infringes on the right of the people — even though legislators are the people’s duly-elected representatives.

When the actual people vote down a marriage amendment, as happened in Arizona two years ago, somehow that’s not legitimate and there needs to be a revote.

These people don’t care about “the people’s right” at all. All they care about is getting rid of icky homosexuals. And somehow they think banning same-sex marriage is going to do that.

Because, you know, homosexuals didn’t exist until same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in 2004.

Weekends

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Sometimes at the end of the weekend, or on Monday morning, I think back to Friday night and wish I could just freeze a moment from it. On Friday after work, Matt and I rode a New Jersey Transit train out to the suburbs to have dinner with my parents and some old friends of theirs. The train was bright and sunny and filled with relaxed commuters. When we got off the train in the ‘burbs, we walked to a nearby wine store and brought my parents some wine. Then we walked to the house, had wine, went out to the deck and sat at a table underneath an umbrella surrounded by trees and ate delicious food.

When I was a kid, I often liked to just sit at the table and listen to the adults have interesting conversations. Now I can actually be part of the conversation.

Just as the best part of a vacation is often the very beginning, when you’ve come home from work (or, way back when, from school) and realized that you have a wonderful stretch of time ahead to look forward to, sometimes the best part of the weekend is the very beginning. At the end of a vacation I wish I could go back to that moment at the beginning, when I was anticipating everything to come, and just hold the moment.

The rest of the weekend was unexciting. We spent most of it indoors, watching TV. Yesterday I made a recipe from a cookbook: curried chicken salad. It’s tasty and I brought some for lunch today.

The problem with doing nothing but sitting around watching TV is that it doesn’t create any memories. One hour runs into another and you’ve just stared at a screen the whole time. You haven’t experienced anything new or hung out with interesting people. One thing I’ve realized in the last few years is that I’m more of an extrovert than I used to think. I’m still an introvert in lots of ways, and sometimes I’m nervous about meeting new people — but I do need people in my life. I don’t have very many friends whom I see regularly. It’s my own fault for not taking the initiative. And since Matt is more of an introvert, it’s pretty much all on me.

Watching TV wasn’t all bad. We downloaded and watched the crazy season finale of “Doctor Who.” We re-watched the last few episodes of “Mad Men” and then watched the season premiere. I watched parts of “The Wizard of Oz,” which happened to be on TV. That movie never ceases to be special.

But sometimes I worry that I’ll look back on my life and see that I haven’t done enough fun things. I’ll see a succession of empty weekends. A few thousand of them.

Oh, well. Another weekend is just four days away.