Bingo!

Yep, that's it, I feel approximately the same about homosexuality as you do about hunting. The analogy breaks down, however, when you talk about voting to allow hunters to marry. The difference is that hunters are already allowed to marry, and we don't need your vote to do it. Now if there was a ballot initiative proposing to prohibit hunters from marrying, it would be different than the time I voted to ban gays from marrying, and here's why: Gays were not previously allowed to marry in Michigan, and we voted to keep it that way. Some other states had already allowed it, and there was concern that, if a gay couple had been married in one of those states, and then they moved to Michigan, we would have to recognize that marriage under the "full faith and credit" clause in the U.S. Constitution. I said at the time that what we needed to do was amend the federal constitution, but that wasn't put on the ballot, so I voted for the Michigan proposal as better than nothing. If a majority of the states had done the same thing, it would have sent a message to the feds that gay marriage was unpopular, but they didn't. Since the majority of the states eventually voted to allow gay marriage, the Supreme Court was actually ruling with the majority for a change. Well, it's a done deal now, and I don't see any way to undo it, the same as if you guys voted to prohibit hunters from marrying. What would you do about all the hunters that are already married?

I was surprised when you said that only four or five percent of the people in this country are gay, but I was also surprised to find that out about hunters and Indians. I seems like there should be way more people in all those groups because they make so much noise and command so much of the public's attention. It would be wrong to allow 95% of the people to pick on 5%, which is why we have safeguards against that in our laws. My ilk is fond of pointing that out every time someone brings up majority rule as an argument, so it would be hypocritical of me to argue against it. I never said that we should persecute the gays anyway, just that we shouldn't allow them to get married to each other. We have now given them something that they didn't have before, which is kind of like rewarding bad behavior, but I suppose you could say the same thing about expanding hunting opportunities for people like me. A controversy has been raging for decades about taking wolves off the endangered list and allowing limited hunting of them in areas where they are starting to be a nuisance. If you disapprove of hunting, you are bound to disapprove of adding another species to the list of legitimate quarry, regardless of the effect it might have on the species or the people who live around them.

Of course there are a lot of things that used to be legal and are no longer legal, and I suppose a certain amount of that is bound to happen as time marches on. What bothers me about homosexuality is the seemingly arbitrary way it has been legitimized over the years. You have challenged me to defend my position on the matter, but I feel that my position was here first, so you are the one who needs to justify your position. When slavery was abolished it was first argued about for decades, and then they finally had to fight a civil war to settle it. This gay thing seems to have slipped in the back door while nobody was paying attention, and now we're stuck with it. If it's really only 5%, I guess it's not the end of the world. Maybe they will quit crying about it now that they have what they want and we can all get on with our lives.

I finished "The Lost City" some time ago, so we can discuss that if you want. I agree that the author doesn't seem to have a plan to restore community life in America, although he does talk about the pendulum swinging back some day of its own accord. The book was a trip down Memory Lane for me, but I can't think of anything about the 50s that I would like to see restored. Maybe that's because I was pretty young then, and I never did like being a child. If I could turn back the clock, I wouldn't go back a day before March 1, 1967, the day I got out of the army and started my real life.