Category Archives: General

Gay Marriage Letter

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This letter in the Times almost made me cry.

Governor Paterson will have a place in our hearts all of our lives. We have been married for 36 years and are blessed with four children. Our youngest, Jacob, happens to be gay. Three of them were married in the last couple of years. It has been a time of great joy for our family as they wed the love of their lives.

When our oldest son, Benjamin, got married, he asked Jacob to be his best man. Then our son Joshua got married and again Jacob was his best man. When our daughter, Britta, married her dear Matthew, she didn’t have a maid of honor. She had a man of honor, and it was her brother Jacob.

At each wedding, as Jacob stood by his siblings and signed the papers to make it legal, he did it knowing he did not have the right to marriage himself.

As a mom, I find that hard to understand and heartbreaking to know it is true. How can this country treat people in such a way that something as basic as finding love and being married can be denied to a whole segment of society?

We will do all that it takes to make sure our dear son Jacob can marry the love of his life. But right now, I want to send our love to Governor Paterson. He makes me want to move to New York!

Randi Reitan
Eden Prairie, Minn., May 30, 2008

Presumably her son is this Jacob Reitan.

Charlie Savage to NY Times

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Charlie Savage is a hero of mine. Savage, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting in the Boston Globe on the hidden workings of the Bush administration, wrote last year’s Takeover, about how Dick Cheney has worked for over 30 years to eviscerate the system of governmental checks and balances and concentrate power in the executive branch.

Well, it turns out Savage has left the Boston Globe and joined the New York Times. I saw his byline on an article this morning and did a double take. I looked him up, and sure enough, he just started there. (This is his first Times article.) Awesome.

Big loss for the Globe, though.

Paterson’s Marriage Decision II

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Richard E. Barnes, the executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference, said yesterday in response to Governor Paterson’s new policy interpretation recognizing out-of-state same-sex marriages:

“No single politician or court or legislature should attempt to redefine the very building block of our society in a way that alters its entire meaning and purpose.”

He doesn’t seem to understand that the “entire meaning and purpose” of marriage has been altered many times over the years — over centuries, in fact — and that this is not because of a “single politician or court or legislature,” but because of the evolution of society. Marriage is no longer about the joining of two families for economic benefit; it’s no longer about dowries and the subsuming of a woman’s legal identity into that of a man; it’s no longer about the survival of your tribe. For some people it’s not even about having children. Marriage can be about having children, and raising a family, and it usually is. But not always. It can be about happiness and personal stability. It can be about economic benefits. People get married for all sorts of reasons today, and liberalized divorce laws attest to how much society’s definition of marriage has changed over the years.

Seriously, I wish some of these people would do some actual thinking sometimes, before or instead of running their mouths.

Also from the Times today on the governor’s decision: how the governor came to support gay rights early in his career, how same-sex marriage opponents face an uphill battle in challenging the decision, and an editorial on how this is a step closer to justice.