With terrorist attacks the world over, earthquakes that daily demonstrate our fragility, and with the trivialities of life - such as choosing paper or plastic at the supermarket - the entire issue of same-sex marriage hadn't really made my thought calendar.
Until now.
Recently, I read an Associated Press story about a county in Tennessee that banned gays, an idiocy that was quickly rectified. However, the irony was that it occurred in Dayton, site of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial.
For non-history buffs (and non-movie watchers) Scopes was John Thomas Scopes, brought to trial in Rhea County in 1925 for supposedly teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in the local high school. He was found guilty and paid a nominal fine.
It was called the "trial of the century," and featured heavyweight lawyers Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan, a fiery politician, for the prosecution. For a brief snapshot in time, the media spotlight was focused on little Dayton. The trial inspired a motion picture, "Inherit The Wind."
Realizing their modern day embarrassment - that they would be thought of as pre-Neanderthals - the current county commissioners took just three minutes to retreat from their edict that homosexuals could be charged with crimes against nature.
The underlying reason for their action, however, remained. It was unbridled homophobia.
Having interviewed the aged but still interesting Mr. Scopes during the early 1970s, I found myself reflecting on the current, though brief, witch hunt, and to examine my own thinking about what makes, as the British say, a proper marriage.
For me, this is unusual. I think about same-sex marriages about as often as I think about religious creationism versus the natural evolution of mankind, which is to say hardly at all. Evolution seems rather proven and logical; creationism symbolic but meaningful. They are more afterthoughts than thoughts, however.
On our primary question, about the marriage of gays, I come down squarely on wishing things were as they once were, with a man in tuxedo and woman in white dress atop the wedding cake. However, things are not as I, and perhaps you, wish them to be.
Several judges and city officials, the first in San Francisco, have permitted gay marriages, whether they carry legal force or not. Both U.S. presidential candidates, one would suspect reluctantly, have been drawn into the fray.
To protect his support base on the religious right, President George W. Bush has gone so far as to propose a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The other candidate, Sen. John Kerry, says that a constitutional amendment goes too far. However, Kerry, who has already established his liberal credentials, is quick to add that he believes marriage is between a man and a woman.
In any event, the issue has taken center stage as a topic for national debate in the United States, if not internationally. While we can declare our ambivalence, we have an obligation to our conscience to have an opinion, just as we have views on issues from capital punishment to saving Florida manatees to global warming.
Otherwise, we are more than anti-intellectual. We are brain-dead. For some of us, who grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s thinking nothing of taunting the kid who was a little, as we said then, queer, the subject matter is uncomfortable.
Rather late in life, I came to the enlightened view - most others were already enlightened - that a gay person is not gay by choice, but rather by genetic print. Common sense, a more persuasive argument in this case then science, is telling.
Why would anyone choose to be abused? Why would anyone subject themselves to overt discrimination? Why would anyone enter into a long-term relationship knowing the outcome might never be civil union or the benefit of a civil union?
There is another element too complicated for this discussion: Marriage as we know it today is not as we have known it. The family unit is changing due to issues of mobility, job migration, social morays and other factors.
About 50 per cent of us are divorced. Children are raised by couples, married or otherwise, single parents (some men, some women) and an increasing number of lesbians and gays, whether they are currently attached or not.
In March, we added a question about same-sex marriages to The Willard Group's Online Opinion Leader Survey. It was a vigorously competitive question, and a small majority favored such unions.
My feelings on the topic are not terribly important, but are obvious - belatedly so - from this column.
The question is: What are yours?
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