05 September 2006

Glenn Grothman throws the first stone.

Hi folks,

Wow, I'll tell you what, it must be good to be without sin -- and Glenn knows how it feels.

Glenn's little column in the West Bend Express News this weekend (2 September 06) went after opponents of the ban-on-civil-unions-amendment that'll be on the ballot in November. The column was the kind of political "discussion" that gives professional logicians like me a migraine. You look for order and coherence and it feels like walking barefoot over broken glass.

Anyway, their arguments about marriage are like broken glass wrapped in the creamy frosting of fear (eg. homosexuals are trying to take over America) and the morphine of righteous indignation (eg. there's nothing wrong with my marriage).


So, let's try this again:

1) Marriage is a religious institution and therefore should lie safely outside legislative whim.

2) Voting to protect marriage is like voting from a lifeboat to patch the Titanic. Half of all marriages fail these days -- an amendment cementing the present form of marriage into law will simply perpetuate a 50% failure rate. And again, this isn't the state's business.

3) The amendment doesn't simply restrict 'marriage' but locks out any 'civil union' that even looks like marriage. Senior citizens who want to move in together and still preserve their pensions and benefits are going to be cut out of legal protection.

From here Glenn launches into an argument that gay people don't have to be gay. This appeared as a kind of "Bat-turn" in the middle of his article and made me raise both eyebrows -- you know that creepy feeling you get when people change the topic a bit too suddenly? It makes you wonder what their real agenda is.

Was Glenn really writing about marriage or about trying to justify his politically test-marketed conviction that homosexuality is a sinful practice?

I assume it must be political and not religious, since no truly religious person would ever be this comfortable throwing the first stone.

So which is it Glenn?




hiho
Mpeterson

3 comments:

Rozy said...

Hard to believe that the exceptional editorial staff at the West Bend Express News would undermine their journalistic integrity by publishing a biased article based on unsound and irrational premises, penned by a fundamentalist, right-wing nutbag. (West Bend's version of al-Jazeera?)

Mpeterson said...

Well, the WB Express will have to look to their own journalistic ethics, but I'm pretty sure Glenn is not a fundamentalist.

He professes to be a Missouri synod Lutheran and, while conservative, their pastors typically know enough New Testament Greek to make a fundamentalist reading of scripture impossible.

Anonymous said...

Has Grothman ever been married? After a lot of looking I can find no information on a wife or children.