History presents a long list of groups of people who have been constantly designated as being separate, inferior, and apart from deserving of the freedoms and privileges of the mainstream and dominant culture of a given place and time. The treatment that they get varies from mild disenfranchisement to history’s worst examples of human behavior: enslavement, torture, and mass murder.
In any of history’s examples that you might choose to examine you will always see three necessary components that need to be in place before any group of people can be singled out and marginalized. Those three things are hatred, ignorance, and complacency.
Those people who represent the first two elements, hatred and ignorance, must be powerful or vocal enough to intimidate the complacent in order to keep them silent and submissive. Without a mass of complacent people who can be controlled by fear or reduced to indifference the haters and the distracted are nearly ineffective and will completely lose their ability to have a wholesale effect on the population. In that way, evil itself collapses like a threelegged stool with one leg missing.
History can cut in different ways. In the same way that women have the right to vote in this country, and also in the same way that people of color are recognized by law as having the full rights and benefits of citizenship as any other citizen, freedom will win out for everyone, and white Protestant heteros like myself along with mainstream America in general will learn to respect the basic rights of responsible persons of different sexual orientations.
The question now is which side of history will we look back at and see ourselves on, or if you find yourself on the wrong side of history, which leg of that rickety three-legged stool did you occupy?
Vote no on the marriage amendment on November 6th.
Gregory Gailen
Grand Marais
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