The world changes more and more rapidly and some cannot cope

Sometimes our world changes almost overnight, and sometimes the change seems to take forever.

Technological changes are usually the rapid ones, while societal progress comes much more slowly.

But once in a while, things seem to happen almost overnight.

Even though they didn't.

It was only 15 years ago that voters in California passed a proposition restricting marriage to one man and one woman.

I voted for it, but I was a 50-year-old Roman Catholic who thought civil unions was a pretty fair compromise.

I was wrong.


In my defense, I was probably more naive about homosexuality growing up than almost anyone I knew. When I came of age in the '60s and '70s, I didn't know anyone who was openly gay. I had no concept that being gay meant anything more for a man than being, well, being a sissy.

And even though what I felt for my very closest male friends was certainly love, I couldn't have imagined any of them as either a sexual partner or a significant other.

But just as most of us learn as we mature, I came to see there were far more different types of love relationships than I had ever realized. And when Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority came along in the '80s and AIDS started killing gay men, things got complicated.

Reagan's callous indifference toward the AIDS pandemic for the first six years of his presidency was unforgivable, pushing him far over toward the religious right and showing little tolerance for anyone different.

But times change.

People progress, and just as Reagan warmed to AIDS when his friend Rock Hudson came down with it, more and more Americans realized they knew people who were gay or lesbian. And when the nice, helpful guy from down the street turns out to be gay, then maybe gay people aren't so awful.

When I was in my early 20s, my friends and I used to joke about which one of us was most likely to "go gay." Hey, Nixon was in the White House. There wasn't much else to laugh about.

One of my friends progressed very slowly. Long after most of us had begun using the word "gay," he said proudly that he had stopped calling gay people "queers" in favor of "homos."

Imagine how he felt when Americans progressed first to accepting civil unions and then starting to have positive feelings about same-sex marriage. It was a shame so much of it had to be done by the courts. Folks on the right seem to treat that kind of change as somehow illegitimate.

But if there was any doubt about the way the wind is blowing, a national referendum in Ireland resulted in the legalization of same-sex marriage in that Catholic country.

If you look at polls in this country, those divided by age group, the younger the voters the more likely they are to be tolerant toward same-sex marriage.

And now that the Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriage is legal and must be recognized, the anti-gay religious right is in danger of people's heads exploding with anger. Several presidential candidates chasing after the American Taliban vote claim that God will punish America for it and indeed America will not survive gay marriage.

It always fascinates me to hear politicians and pundits who have been divorced two or three times and who have been, shall we say, challenged when it comes to marital fidelity saying that gay marriage will destroy traditional marriage in this country.

Loving vs. Virginia, 1967

Of course they said the same thing about interracial marriage. When the Supreme Court ruled that so-called miscegenation laws were unconstitutional and people of different races must be allowed to marry, the percentage of people opposed ran as high as 90 percent in some states.

Now even Deep South states like my own Georgia have accepted interracial marriage, and other than those on the lunatic fringe, nobody thinks it's destroying civilization.

As society changes and some folks are left behind intellectually, they tend to become more frantic. Some of was pre-millennial, I think. Toward the end of centuries and particularly millennia, the simple-minded tend to think the world is coming to an end. I've told the story before of the French village that in 999 AD had all its people spend the last months of the year sitting on a hill outside town waiting for God to come and get them.

On the first day of the year 1000, they sighed, went back to town and back to work.

Not just yet.

Our simple-minded don't give up that easily. We're nearly 16 years past the millennium and they're still waiting for someone to take them off to heaven. Of course, they really do miss the point.

Love -- and life -- are not only for the lucky or the strong, and God doesn't punish you for not liking Justin Bieber. Or for liking him for that matter. And the folks who say God hates fags, it just isn't true.

God is love.

For everyone.