Marriage in the USA

Two interesting articles have appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The first dealt with a small town in Utah that had passed a resolution which defined the 'natural family' as a man and woman married with the purpose of having children and where the woman stays home as mother and homemaker. The second in the July 8 edition dealt with a group in Massachusetts, MassResistance, led by Brian Camenker, who recently petitioned Macy's department store to remove two male mannequins from a store window that promoted gay pride week.

I would like to begin with the second article as it sets the tone for post. In it, Camenker was quoted as saying, "People feel that as a society they're under assault, that you can't walk down the street anymore without having this [gay rights] in your face." If the irony of that statement doesn't smack you in the face, nothing will. There is nowhere one can go without seeing a man-woman couple and the woman is pregnant. You just know that they had had (gasp!) sex. That is certainly flaunting their heterosexuality in your face. This attitude espoused by Camenker and other hate groups is best described as "I have the right to force my lifestyle on you, and you don't have the right to choose your own lifestyle unless it matches with mine." it is the typical conservative Christian contradiction -- they say they support personal freedom, but only if everyone only excercises their personal freedom in the way proscribed by conservative Christians.

So the first article was about a small conservative Utah town. The 'natural family' resolution passed actually upset a lot of otherwise conservative people in that town, because it had the potential to discriminate against many otherwise 'acceptable' people, single moms, working mothers, couples who don't have/want children, older married couples, and unmarried men and women.

Note:
There is a very good reason I hate the Las Vegas Review-Journal; their web site sucks. Thus the reason for locating the AP and LAT articles in the place of the LV R-J article references I read. That is one thing that really burns me, our LV R-J is nothing but a paper of other people's news stories.