sorting out causes and signs

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker:

In the past forty years, the definition of marriage has indeed been changed, not by any homosexual master plan but by an epidemic of heterosexual divorce. Marriage is a social good—Bush is certainly right about that—but it has become a disposable good. The causes of divorce are manifold, and they do not include gay marriage. (The state with the nation’s lowest divorce rate, Massachusetts, is also the only state where gay marriage is legal.) The day after the Senate vote, USA Today reported that “the number of active-duty soldiers getting divorced has been rising sharply with deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.” The divorce rate among Army enlisted personnel since 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, is up twenty-eight per cent. For officers the increase is seventy-eight per cent. Perhaps this, rather than the imaginary threat of same-sex marriage, is something that the President should look into.

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Davidson County readers: The League of Women Voters is hosting a forum for school board candidates this Thursday.

( angsting over school board choices... )

All of that said, I just now read this post, where Kay Brooks characterizes A Place at the Table as follows:

I'm of the mind that the core mission of public education is very narrow. You'll have a hard time convincing me that it includes indoctrination by the Southern Poverty Law Center via their video on civil rights. This video, we're told, equates the struggle by certain parties to have their form of mutual love accepted as on par with the struggle by people of color to obtain full personhood.

This is language similar to that used by Carolyn Baldwin Tucker (the most virulently homophobic member of Metro Council) in her ravings against homosexuality. For me, this is the deal-breaker: I will not vote for someone who shares Tucker's narrow-mindedness on this issue.

"Certain parties," indeed. That's a significant segment of my neighborhood you trivialized there, Ms. Brooks.