The Buck and Mike Blog

PUBLIC AFFAIRS: Both of you have mentioned the issue of compassion and this feeling about needing to be compassionate. Let’s fast-forward the scenario that we used earlier, and assume it’s a couple of years later. My conversations with my son, all our efforts to love our son and keep him in the Church have failed to address what he sees as the central issue — that he can’t help his feelings. He’s now told us that he’s moving out of the home. He plans to live with a gay friend. He’s adamant about it. What should be the proper response of a Latter-day Saint parent in that situation?

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This Web site and blog didn’t exist a year ago. The sole reason they came into being: Buckley told an ecclesiastical leader that he just wanted to be left alone to pray in peace. The ecclesiastical leader said no. For over five months, a simple plea to remain a private person was denied again and again. Once it was clear that our private lives would no longer be private, that our desire for privacy would not be honored, together we decided that, if someone else insisted on forcing our lives to be open to public scrutiny, at least we could have some say in the discussion. And so we began our Web site.

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Dear readers,

I read a mock interview on the LDS.org Web site yesterday, and was horrified at what I read:

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Two and a half weeks ago I had laser eye surgery. Not lasik, the quick in-and-out kind. I had PRK, which is like lasik but is on the surface of the cornea, so recovery takes a few weeks.

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Binary thinking is too easy. It provides knee-jerk quick answers to everything, but it denies the validity of life’s rich complexities. Why, then, do so many people insist on making it the basis of their world view? Why do so many of us settle for black and white when we know the world is in color?

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Every once in a while, I like to check the statistics on our Web site and blog. In the last three months alone, we’ve had visitors from these countries, from most to least number of visitors:
United States, Canada, Germany, Japan, China, Netherlands, France, Australia, United Kingdom, Sweden, Singapore, Mexico, Viet Nam, New Zealand, Chile, Hong Kong, Russian Federation, Spain, Israel, Ireland, Romania, Hungary, Argentina, Italy, Guatemala, Brazil, Austria, Thailand, Philippines, Peru, Sudan, Finland, Czech Republic, and Mauritius.

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On July 26, 2006, the Supreme Court of the State of Washington ruled 5-4 to deny equal rights to same-sex couples in regard to civil marriage. You can read the court’s opinion here. A very insightful article dissecting the opinion in plain English can be found here. This article was written by attorney Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry. A very brief excerpt:

The illogic of the rationales, the lack of connection between the purported end and the discriminatory means, alone should have established the ban’s unconstitutionality even more solidly than the weakness of the rationales themselves. Add to that the double standard (marriage is so important, a fundamental right even, when it comes to heterosexuals, but the denial of marriage to gay people is somehow trivial and warrants minimal, indeed no, scrutiny) and what results is no more than a refusal to enforce the constitutional safeguards against the unfair treatment of some.

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equal rights, same-sex, civil marriage, Evan Wolfson, Freedom to Marry