The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a story on the Marriage Amendment fight yesterday. It opened great:
And since when is being gay, as Appling put it, "behavior?"
Lastly, an encouraging quote from the end:
The student in Wade DallaGrana's social studies class at Edgewood High School just blurted out the question, cutting through all the jargon and noise surrounding the marriage debate in Wisconsin.I think that question, and the responses from Julaine Appling of the Family Research Institute of Wisconsin and Mike Tate of Fair Wisconsin, pretty much sum up this whole issue. The supporters of the ban want to outlaw the way some people are and the opponents want to get the State of Wisconsin on the side of the downtrodden, instead of helping with the downtrodding (is that a word?).
"What would you do if one of your children were gay?" the student said Thursday.
For a brief moment, Julaine Appling and Mike Tate, as political an odd couple as you'll ever find, both unmarried without children, were silent.
For months, they had debated up and down the state, and finally, here it was, out of the mouth of a kid at a parochial high school, the question that made it personal, made it about family and love.
Here was Appling, 54, fighting for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as "between one man and one woman," saying that if she had a child "choosing to go into homosexuality" because "that is what I was quote - born - to be," she would pray for that child.
"I would not stop loving that child," Appling said. "Love does not mean condoning every kind of behavior."
Here was Tate, 27, fighting against the amendment, saying, "If I have children, I pray they're not gay. Not because I (would) love them less but because I think it has to be so much harder to be born gay" because they would face a world in which others would want to restrict their rights.
The debate was over. The kids applauded for a long, long time.
And since when is being gay, as Appling put it, "behavior?"
Lastly, an encouraging quote from the end:
"If I can get every voter to think for 15 seconds, I can win this election hands down," [Mike Tate of Fair Wisconsin] says. "I'm not glib about that. Getting voters to think for 15 seconds is really hard because they have lives, families, football."
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