Consider long-time anti-gay activist Louis Marinelli. Last year he was the person behind the Summer for Marriage Tour sponsored by the National Organization for Marriage, literally driving the bus for a series of protests against gay marriage. But sometime during the tour, Marinelli actually started talking to some of the gay people he was supposed to hate. And it changed his world:
I really came to understand that gays and lesbians were just real people who wanted to live real lives and be treated equally as opposed to, for example, wanting to destroy American culture. No, they didn’t want to destroy American culture, they wanted to openly particulate in it.
He now supports full civil marriage equality, saying “The constitution calls for nothing less.”
It isn’t the destination that’s important, it’s the journey.
UPDATE: Despite pretending to be nice to Marinelli, behind the scenes the National Organization for Marriage is threatening to sue him unless he removes from his website the articles he wrote about NOM. Ironically, suing Marinelli would probably do more damage to NOM itself than it could do to Marinelli.
8 Comments
I could care less about the issue to be honest, but the one thing I read and laughed as him saying the constitution calls for nothing less. As I’m sure he was saying quite the opposite during the tour…guess we rewrote the constition without him knowin 😉
It’s the fact that you realize it in midair after you have already driven off the cliff that’s important.
What bothers me about this is that he said he realized that gays and lesbians didn’t want to destroy American culture, the point being that some people honestly and truly believe that they do. It’s one of the worst excuses for being against marriage equality.
🙂 SMILE! 🙂
I know non-Christians (or rather, non-religious perhaps) people who are conservatives who are also adamantly openly opposed to gay marriage. When I’ve asked them why, the answer falls somewhere along the lines of, “thousands of years of civilization, blah blah blah”. It’s really fun to point out that thousands of years of civilizations also believed in the right to own other human beings and to stone people to death without due process. Ain’t facts fun?
Conservatism is like The Force, it has a light side and a dark side. Come to think of it, duct tape is like that too.
But you can actually use duct tape to fix things.
Couldn’t resist! 😉
The only thing that’s really surprising to me about this is that he came out as a proponent of gay rights instead of an openly gay or denying gay man.
Everyone should have duct tape. I can’t say that about conservatism.
Ducttapeism!