Food for Thought from North Carolina’s Referendum

1. I’m not really surprised that the measure to legally define marriage as a union between a man and a woman passed. Yet it’s still a somber reminder that this nation still has a long way to go.

2. The disheartening reaction some have had in response to this reminded me of Neil Young’s “Alabama”:

Oh Alabama,
can I see you and shake your hand?
Make friends down in Alabama.
I’m from a new land,
I come to you and see all this ruin.
What are you doing Alabama?
You got the rest of the union to help you along,
what’s going wrong?

That’s the attitude we need right now. Not “let’s sever ties with North Carolina.” They’re us, and we have to own as a country what happened there tonight. To pretend that homophobia is a geographically isolated phenomena is foolish, and to act as if there aren’t allies in the state is unfair and self-defeating.

3. By the way, gay marriage kinda goes back to the Middle Ages, interestingly enough.

4. The whole of sports, not just MMA, needs more guys like Jason High.

His point is absolutely on the money. A straight referendum in New York would not have passed, and there’s a very good reason it didn’t come to that: because it wouldn’t be right. If referendums were how this sort of thing were determined, we’d still be, as a society, stuck in the nineteenth century.