Gay marriage: Be still my beating heart

(646 words)

The typical human heart beats about 3.5 billion times in an average life and it’s been estimated the heart of a man or woman who lives to 100 will beat 4,204,800,000 times.

A one, anna two, anna three . . .

I contend pharmaceutical companies will soon develop drugs that will artificially and safely slow or stop our heart beats during things like sleep or required attendance at Will Farrell movies we’d rather not see. 

This could prolong heart life by as much as 50 years without missing a beat.

Well, you know what I mean

But you’ll need a faithful spouse or legally recognized significant other you trust to ensure they will bring you back to life rather than let you expire from an empty heart.

I was happy to see so many happy hearts beating faster yesterday.

Yet, it all felt so odd to me and it took most of the day before I understood why.

It was because I’d never experienced a day when public opinion so successfully swamped history.

The Supreme Court’s eventual ruling in Hollingsworth v. Perry is already being steam rolled into irrelevance. It should ratify what solid and growing majorities of Americans already understand is just. Or else it can disgrace itself with another Scalia-authored scold that every Republican left of Rick Santorum will soon legislate into judicial obsolescence.

Today, even conservative senators like Rob Portman are waking up saying, “My God, I have to face the fact that there is a gay person in my family  . . . and I taught him how to play catch!”

No civil rights issue in history has moved from controversial to affirmation so swiftly.

I guess it happened so much more quickly for gays than African-Americans because no conservative senator’s son ever sat his old man down and said, “Dad, I’m black. I was born black and from now on I’m going to stop pretending I’m white. Deal with it.”

Mine is probably the last generation of Americans that grew up telling ignorant gay jokes without feeling any hostility toward gays. Calling someone gay for liking things like Duran Duran was just a convenient put-down.

I remember laughing at an old Eddie Murphy routine where he talked about couples he thought would be funny homosexuals. He mentioned Ralph Cramden and Ed Norton from “The Honeymooners” and Fred and Barney from “The Flintstones.”

We knew gay men and women, but felt we didn’t have enough in common with them to hang out. They were different. They were alien. To us, they were a little scary.

I contend that’s not prejudice. In many regards, we felt the same way about gays as we did about heterosexual girls.

Talking to them just made us feel awkward.

But we knew instinctively when something was or wasn’t fair and we grew up to become men and women who are appalled at any injustice or cruelty inflicted on anyone based on how they look, where they worship or who they love.

It is patently un-American.

So today I’m thrilled for gays, as I am for America that after centuries of inaccurate boasting is finally, inch by inch, becoming an idealistic land where all men and women are created equal.

And I’m most thrilled for my daughters’ generation and all those that will follow.

They will grow up in an America where “being gay” is one less careless insult they can let slip that might hurt the feelings of a shy friend, where it’s one less pejorative that might sting a still-developing soul that needs nurturing. 

Their America will be different than the one in which I grew up. It will be a more inclusionary, creative and vibrant nation. It will be an even better America.

It will be an America where loving songs by bands like Duran Duran isn’t gay.

It’s just tasteless.

Related . . .

My gay friend John

The gayest sports figure in Pittsburgh history

America needs snitch prayers

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I was in the midst of conducting a jiffy little lunch grace with the 6-year-old when I decided to include a subtle morality lesson.

“And, please, God, forgive Lucy for drawing little devil horns, pointy tail and pitchfork on the missionaries on the cover of this week’s church bulletin at Sunday service when she should have been praying.”

Her thundered rebuttal was instantaneous.

“That was him!”

Note the precise construction of her divine debunk.

She didn’t even address me. She responded as if God was right there at the lunch table ready to referee the dispute.

And, boy, would this blog post be different if He had.

I like that our little prayer sessions have her believing God is right there in the room with us and she can instantly narc on me for including a fib in my prayer, like the one I did about the drawings.

In fact, she’s right. I was the one who instigated the sacrilegious little doodle, one of the many little distractions I deploy to make attending church bearable for someone with a first grade attention span -- and I’ll let you decide whether I’m referring to myself or my first grade pew mate.

I’m resuming attending church again after taking about a year off for what I consider logistical reasons.

My wife is our Lutheran church organist. That means she’s required to be there nearly every Sunday for both the 8 o’clock and 10:30 services. Been that way for years.

Her obligation transforms what used to be the most peaceful time of the week into the most chaotic.

The girls fight. The drag their feet. They require me to do Mommy things like fix their hair, make them breakfast and cajole them into being on time.

It’s a real pain for someone who for decades held Sundays sacred for things like hangover recuperation and Three Stooges marathons.

And, yes, I’m acutely aware of the hypocrisy of letting minor nuisances like warming up Pop Tarts hinder me from going to worship a man who died on the cross for my sins, but that’s just how I feel.

If you believe what they say in church then God already knows that.

It is said He knows all, sees all.

Every time I hear that I wonder if He reads my blog. Somedays I hope not.

Most of my prayers involve thanking God for what I have and asking Him to help those who are sick, sad or lonely.

It wasn’t until my lunch conflict with Lucy that I considered the appropriateness of being a prayer snitch.

The concept is not without appeal, although it seems to run right up against Biblical stipulations about leaving all the judgements up to God -- and that must infuriate Justice Scalia.

To hell with the hereafter, I think we’d all like to see God take a more active role in punishing jerks in the here and now.

Maybe a groundswell of complaints about loutish behavior would lead to Almighty action.

It wouldn’t take much for people to notice and fly right. Sure, it would be great if He incinerated Syrian butcher Bashar Assad with a bolt of lightning, but it would have just as significant an impact if, say, Donald Trump woke up tomorrow bald.

There are just too many people hurting too many others with bad behavior that too often seems to go unpunished. Prayer snitching might help change that. 

We’re just closing the books on the season where the sacred and secular compete for our attentions.

It would be an improvement if next year when someone says familiar lines about an omnipotent being who sees us when we’re sleeping and knows when we’re awake more of us would think of someone besides Santa.

People need to be good, for goodness sake.

And if that doesn’t work, they should be good because they’re afraid someone will rat them out with a snitch prayer.

Related . . .

Proper prayer posture

When idiots pray