To the Editor:
On the letters pages last week, Michael Bourland made a long argument for the maintenance of tradition in the same-sex marriage debate. He seems to think that change is the enemy.
He wrote, “Once it’s proved that a long-standing boundary can be moved, then the whole concept of boundaries themselves are downgraded from edifices of safety and stability into temporary bookmarks of convenience; so much the easier to manipulate and control the population.”
This sounded very much like some of the arguments from the early 20th century against women’s suffrage. Men had always done the voting and there was no need to change that. Further, there’s that “slippery slope;” once you let women vote, next thing you know they’re going to want to run for office or hold cabinet positions (like Secretary of State).
Well, just because you’ve always done something in a certain way doesn’t mean you’ve been doing it the best way. When we enfranchised women, we became a better country; a more tolerant and inclusive society. I believe we’ll find the same result with same-sex marriage. We’ve made wonderful progress in the civil rights arena over the past hundred years, but we’re not done yet.
Mr. Bourland favors civil unions, a supposedly “separate but equal” solution. We tried that with race relations and it didn’t work. It blew up in our faces in the 1960s, for the simple reason that it wasn’t fair.
To deny change is to eliminate any chance of improvement in our society. To discriminate against homosexuals and, make no mistake, denying their right to marriage is discrimination, cheapens all of us. Too much tolerance in a society is an extremely rare thing, and I don’t think we need to worry about it in this case.
Let’s not be prisoners of tradition when we have an opportunity to do and be – something better.
Galen Rose, Damariscotta
