Inevitable

The times...they are a'changin.  The rulings today by the Supreme Court striking down provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act and in effect nullifying Proposition 8 in California indicate a bit of seismic shift.  I don't think I've seen any cultural shift as fast in my lifetime.  When the military lifted the ban on gays, i wrote a little ditty on it.  You can read it here.  Like many folks, I've evolved quite a bit.  Although for me, marriage really means a union between one man and one woman, who am I to dictate who loves who.  And it just comes down to fairness.  As I said in the previous post, fairness and equality are pretty fundamental to our democracy.  We have to uphold those principles.  

I worry though about the impacts to society.  I worry about kids being brought up in households with same sex parents.  I know, I know...it happens all the time and the kids are fine.  Plenty of examples can be trotted out.  And there are plenty of screwed up kids who are products of traditional households. But still, I have concerns.  And I worry about the cultural impacts.  These decisions will create more division.  And if there is anything we don't need, it's more division.  God knows the current crowd in power has used division to their advantage.  And I worry what it'll do to traditional churches.  Some will resist it forever.  Some will embrace it.  Some will try and accommodate it.  But it will have an impact.  The Christian church is in trouble.  Membership is dwindling.  This won't help.  I worry that the rest of the world will just see this as another example of American decadence and hold us in even more disdain.  For those of you who believe in the "kumbaya" theory of National Security Strategy, it's really a big, dirty, bad, world out there.  This change will not be met with open arms by billions of people around the world.  Obama has already taken us to a position of weakness and ineffectiveness in dealing with other countries.  This change could serve to only exacerbate that.  

But...the change has occurred.   We have spent an incredible amount of time on this and other cultural issues, which in the scheme of things, are pretty inconsequential.  In a better world, I'd hope that we can put this behind us and concentrate on the $17T debt, the crumbling infrastructure, the tragedy of a rising murder rate by handguns, homelessness, the disaster that is our National Security Strategy, etc, etc, etc. But I'm pretty sure that the media won't let that happen.  Tomorrow the Zimmerman trial will be front and center and whatever the latest gotcha is inside the beltway will be page one above the fold stories.  Our journalists are letting us down.  Wonder if they know it?