The Blogosphere

It's hard to believe that it's been a year since I started Musing in the Sawdust, but it's been fun and really harder than I expected. I ran out of rants fairly early on, and I now find it difficult to get indignant about much of anything. I suppose that my senior citizen status has helped me to realize that it doesn't do a whole lot of good to rant and rave about perceived injustices. I find that reading other blogs makes me realize that I need to be a better writer if I want to have a readership. I have already decided that it would probably be foolish to try to publish my autobiography, as interesting as I feel it is. I guess you had to be there to see the humor in the stuff I've written about in my memoirs.

I do have a rant though. A bill recently adopted by the State of Oregon gives same sex couples most of the rights enjoyed by married heterosexuals. It is called a Domestic Partnership here in Oregon, but it's much the same as the Civil Union in Vermont. Couples need to register with their County Clerk to be covered by the legislation and would need to do much the same as a divorce to dissolve their union. It is a great step forward in a state that passed a referendum by over 65% that defines marriage as between a man and a woman. In the February 10th Sunday Oregonian there was an Op-Ed piece written by Marylin Shannon, a former Republican Legislator, claiming that the will of the people had been thwarted by this new Bill. She complained that Domestic Partners were being given special rights, hospital visitation, shared health insurance, in general all those rights given married couples. She then ended her piece by saying that she was upset that she had lost so many of her rights, as though giving others the same rights as she has diminishes her own. In my humble opinion, she did lose some rights; the "right" to denounce others as immoral, the "right" to encourage hate crimes against LGBT persons, the "right" to set herself up as judge and jury against those who may be different from her...