Gay marriage?

"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men have certain inalienable rights...life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Damn revolutionaries! If you don't believe in that statement from the Declaration of Independence, you don't have to, thanks to people smarter and better educated and more advanced than any of us, who also died for those words.

This came to mind when Cindy McCain endorsed gay marriage today. I am not gay--as a number of people can certainly testify. I am unabashedly heterosexual. I don't agree with homosexuality. I also don't agree with my brother, my secretary, The Dallas Cowboys, The OKC Thunder, OU football, speed traps, the commercial rape of the American West, Fox "News," many Republicans, high tuition for my students, 60 mph speed limits, "Gay Pride," many administrators, and the Religious Right and Left. I own a rifle and a pistol. So?

But as with one former favorite student whose mother is a lesbian, I agree with Cindy McCain--what I'd expect from a real maverick married to a partial maverick who ran with a fake maverick now on Fox. I don't care. Leave me alone. I'll leave you alone. America is supposed to be big enough for all ideas to get equal treatment--in criticism and respect.

America was founded, not as a Christian nation but in the Age of Reason. Check the facts, if you dare.  The Founding Fathers believed that the universe was logical and that God set it in motion like a clock, and left it up to us to work it out.

They feared organized religion because that's what they had in England--state-sanctioned religion. Just leave people free and they're logical and will choose correctly--don't mandate how one group or another can live or believe or think. And let them choose.

The scariest movement in America--and they have every right to be that way--is the so-called "Religious Right." They want everyone to believe like them, or to enforce on others their beliefs, through laws, lies, pressure and more such "applesauce," (tasty, but empty) as Will Rogers would have said.

All that said, I think Sarah Palin is "hot." No wonder she's attractive to all those morality-prepressed Republicans and the Religious Right. They can get off and have their fantasy of a sexy babe and condemn it at the same time in self-righteous facades.  Face it, someone needs to heat up Alaska, and she does. In my neck of the woods ( Texas, Republic of) we'd refer to her as "all hat and no cattle." But at least she's a cute lil' ol heifer. If this redneck statement don't rile you up, I worry about you. I'm just a recovering Fundamentalist.

In the meantime, here's a toast to a real maverick and woman, independent, Republican, proud, a thinker, a person of  integrity...Cindy McCain.