MountainMornings

Remember those first cell phones? Clunky things you had to charge in your car. We had a friend, an orthopedist in Monmouth County, NJ, who would pace along the Sea Bright beach each summer over 20 years ago talking on his gigantic cell phone. The long antennae would wave at us in the sea breeze. We all thought he must be hugely important. When did we go from doctors trading in their pagers, to plumbers to housewives and now kids carrying their lives around in their hands? At our Seder on Monday night, a 90+ year old gentleman named Gene, a family friend forever who still goes into his office every day, fielded two cell phone calls in the midst of songs and Haggadah. I guess no one told him about cell etiquette, although we were all taking pictures with our cells.

Traveling back to the Blue Ridge, Bob and I were listening with one ear to some of SCOTUS’ arguments in the car about same-sex marriage. BTW, I so wish they would place cameras in the Supreme Court. The phrase that caught my ear and eye was Justice Samuel Alito saying, “Same-sex marriage is younger than cell phones or the Internet.” Well yes but…, the internet is even older than that, and we all know how old sex is, straight, gay or even slightly crooked. It’s about as old as the oldest profession. What’s new is trying to separate our civil society from biblical or religious laws of any kind. In fact, that’s about as new as our country!

Only ex-Solicitor General and conservative thinker Teddy Olson seemed to make any sense of it yesterday saying, “You could have said [of interracial marriage] — you can’t get married, but you can have an interracial union. Everyone would know that that was wrong.” Which begs the question, how is a same-sex legal union different from a marriage? Is a label really that important? Olson compares Prop 8 and all same-sex marriage laws to the civil rights struggle. After all, Lincoln DID free the slaves, but it wasn’t until we saw dogs attacking people on a bridge in Selma that America got the message – so saying one thing IS fundamentally different from doing another. And in my mind, saying California was wrong in imposing Prop 8, the ban on gay marriage, does not go far enough

“Homosexuality, Olson maintains, is much like race. It is not a matter of choice. ‘We are what we are,’ he says. Indeed, he likens the Proposition 8 case to Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case in which the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a law that made interracial marriage a crime.” http://www.npr.org/2010/12/06/131792296/ted-olson-gay-marriage-s-unlikely-legal-warrior

1967, the first year of college for me in Boston. 1968, the year I marched down Commonwealth Avenue in protest after Martin Luther King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, TN. We all know what basic human rights are – the right to love and marry anyone we choose – someone of a different race, religion, clan or even sex is a fundamental right in this country, is it not? Do we have a Taliban telling us what to wear? Do our parents arrange our marriages? We can walk into a town hall or a church or a “chapel” in Vegas and walk out married. Half of us can choose to divorce, we have the right to try that wedding gown on again and again. I watched my step-father, a judge, marry people in our parlor! Love is Love and we are who we are. Cell phones have evolved, and so must we.