I have been watching (because there’s no escape) the media circus in Kentucky with the anointed heroine for the sanctity of marriage via Adam and Eve style. The one whose job requires her to issue marriage licenses to all since the Supreme Court ruling this summer protecting the rights of straight and gay people to marry.
She shunned her job duties, clutched the Bible to her chest and declared, “Not here. Not in this office, so shoo shoo you homos. I say you’re not getting married.” The media (with the attention span of a collective group of squirrels on speed) came in running for more more more. She was the new darling of a 24 hour news cycle that needed filler, and for the Christian right who increasingly shows they have clear and rigid parameters to this whole love one another business.
How this got to be the never-ending story that it is confounds me daily. If you don’t do your job isn’t there a supervisor, manager or, I don’t know, a governor that isn’t the least bit timid enough to say, “Yeah. Kimmy, you do this because the Supreme Court told you so or ask maintenance for a box to pack your stuff so you can get out.” Maybe I’ve always worked for hard asses because insubordination and failure to perform the duties of the job were always deal breakers. Oddly enough, though, like nearly all people in the work force I figured saying an emphatic “NO!!” to anything I didn’t want to do was termination worthy and not newsworthy.
My peek into the world of equal rights started decades ago when the family station wagon passed a group of African Americans, tearful, outraged and protesting when Martin Luther King was shot. The peek grew bigger when I began working and was clearly aware that a man doing the same job as me was paid substantially more. The crack split wide open when my kid said he was gay.
Like Joe the Plumber, Charlie Sheen, Tonya Harding and the Octomom, the current Kentucky clerk will soon become a question on Jeopardy under Flashes in the Media Pan. Even though her lawyer lobbed an outrage grenade comparing issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples as “granting a license to sodomize children”, there is a limit to how much ignorance an audience can absorb before they’re forced to switch to the ballgame to preserve their intellect.
What else can be said when you have a dog in this fight is that you are left to wonder if the job, promotion or apartment didn’t come through because your kid was gay. After all, robust cheering of discrimination is leading the nightly news. There isn’t a camera crew, preacher or presidential candidate in sight when that story happens, though, just the sound of the wheels in your brain turning over and over hoping what you think is true really isn’t.
In the meantime we remain under attack from the newest poster child stepping onto the podium of hate, much to the delight of a complicit media filling the airwaves with nonsense.
Bur from my shoes there is no thrill in this fight…..only the sickening thought that it’s my kid they’re after.