My Own Public Idaho
Being from Idaho, this article was interesting to me. This is from My Own Public Idaho -- Wading Into the Gay Marriage Issue
The battle will continue to rage in the opinion pages long after the issue is dead in the legislature and decided in the Supreme Court, to be sure, but opinions are often more candidly expressed in midnight barroom chats. On a recent evening in an Idaho Falls tavern, a local exhaled a thick cloud of smoke and announced, "I never thought I'd see faggots in Idaho."
"They're all coming up from California," the bartender replied, and the discussion naturally turned to San Francisco and gay marriage. The smoker who had seen his first homosexual in Idaho said, "I've got a marriage license for you -- it comes with a bullet," and the room erupted in approving chuckles.
I kept out of the fray, partly because I'm an unbiased reporter, but mostly because I'm a skinny guy all alone in Eastern Idaho, which is not so far from Wyoming, which is Matthew Shepard territory. When bullet-man left, I told the bartender that it was unlikely there was a mass migration from temperate and tolerant California to deep-frozen and straight-laced Idaho.
"I know," he said. "We blame everything on California here. One of my best friends is gay, actually."
A woman across the room lamented, "I don't understand why we can't all get along. It's for God, not us, to decide."
Why did the bartender not defend his friend to bullet-man? Why did the woman not bring God in to the debate earlier? Why did I hide behind impartiality when bullet-man joked about using deadly force on a group of people he disagreed with? Why? Because the three of us thought we were alone in our beliefs, when in fact, the man was alone in his hatred.
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I'm glad I found your blog, there is a lot of interesting material on here that I probably would never have seen otherwise. This article, for instance, is beautiful. I'm from Washington State, which I see as the intersection between California and Idaho in many ways (East meets West?), and the idea that large numbers of gay people would voluntarily migrate from CA to ID is the funniest thing I've read all day!
At any rate, the concluson is definitely food for thought. Thanks for sharing this.