Okay. Your responses got me to thinking. If I am to be true to my personal ideology, I honestly don’t care what other people do, as long as it does not infringe upon the rights or freedom of others. However, when I think upon it, I guess that due to my Catholic upbringing, I still view marriage as a largely religious/social contract that serves the sole purpose of legitimizing the offspring of a union between a man and a woman. So while I am in favor of providing domestic partnership benefits, the concept of gay marriage seems somewhat counterintuitive(or at best moot) to me, given the interpretation of marriage that I provided. When you start adding the recent complications of gay couples adopting, survivor benefits, and so forth, this does become a topic too complicated to intelligently argue in the space of a few hundred words.(At least, for one as verbose as me.)
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but if I remember right you’ve mentioned the homogeneity of the people in your area.”
This is not entirely accurate. I work in a very diverse workplace, with Whites, Blacks, Asians, Indians, Arabs, Latinos, and gays. However, it is not very class diverse. I am a financial software developer, so basically everyone I work with has a college degree and is a trained professional. My neighborhood is pretty white, however. I lived in much more diverse environments in the past(Las Vegas, when I was in the Air Force, for example.) Further, since I am an adult, I can choose the people with whom I socialize, which isn’t a whole lot of people.
Your post really got me thinking, though. The point I was trying to make by stating that “Almost every single person that I meet is a good, decent person.” was that in general, I think that the people I interact with regularly are good, and try to do the right thing. But this was, perhaps naive. Beyond the facade that they put up in public, I really don’t know what a lot of people are like. Many of the people that I think I know could actually be rotten, but I never see it because I only see them at work, or at the pool, or in other social settings where their warts would not show. Let me say then that the people I choose to associate with at this point in my life have the seeming of decency and goodness.
I thank both you and Joe M for your responses. I largely agree with what you’re saying about progress and not having anyone dictate to you what is right or wrong. I guess my frustration comes from the fact that I really don’t approve of the apparent agendas of either major political party or the various media outlets, all of whom seem to be pimping ideologies that I do not share.