One amazing woman...

A Widow’s Wisdom

SEATTLE – Every once in a while the unconvincing, bristly language of the culture wars gives way to a genuine plea from the heart. And it’s in these rare moments, when words are freed from their ideological captors, that the politics of these issues are shown to be so hollow.

We had one of these public cris de coeur here in the remarkable run-up to Washington’s legalizing same-sex marriage this week. A middle-aged, heterosexual legislator, Maureen Walsh, who is a conservative Republican from the small town of Walla Walla, rose to explain why she would be bucking her party on one of the most contentious social issues of the day.

“I was married for 23 years to the love of my life, and he died six years ago,” said Walsh. “I’m a lonely old widow right now. I’m 51 years old, looking for a boyfriend and not having much luck with that. And yet, when I think of my husband, I don’t miss the sex—”

There followed a few seconds of uncomfortable laughter in the marble chambers of Olympia. O.K, she acknowledged, the sex was fine. But more important was the love. “I think to myself: how could I deny anyone that incredible bond I had with another individual in life? It seems almost cruel.”

A few days after a video of Walsh’s speech went viral, making the mother from Walla Walla a hero to many people around the world, Rick Santorum brought his crusade against gays and birth control to this state.

Santorum spoke to a crowd inside an Olympia church, and then tussled with protesters at a public event in Tacoma. He is obsessed with other people’s sex lives and determined to repeal both a half-century of forward thinking on contraception and decades of progress on how people treat their gay and lesbian fellow citizens. But you could almost see his words disappear on a Puget Sound gust as he spoke.

You may not hear it from their presidential candidates, but the party of Lincoln is torn between its language of liberty and its prescriptions to deny that freedom to millions of Americans.

Santorum, though surging for the moment in Republican primary polls, is the past. He says mutually consenting adults do not have the constitutional right to privacy. Laws that criminalize sex between some citizens exist to prevent acts which “undermine the basic tenets of our society.” These tenets, he says, trump civil authority. “God gave us laws that we must abide by.”

So gays in the military, now risking life and limb for their country, would be run out of the service, as per an old policy he wants reinstated. And should he become president, he promises, anyone currently married to a member of the same sex would have that union invalidated by a constitutional amendment.

He couches his opposition to family planning and gay love as a brave stand against intolerance – the state “imposing” its values on people of faith. Of course, churches are exempt under the new law from having to perform same-sex marriages. No matter. Most of what Santorum says is bound for a time capsule, the one that holds arguments for failed philosophies of the past.

Representative Walsh, trembling, fighting back tears as she spoke, is the future. She said something at the end of her speech that critics might dismiss as self-interest, born of family ties. But once again she made irrefutable sense. Her daughter, she explained, is gay, and in love.

“Someday, by God, I want to throw a wedding for that kid,” said Walsh. “I hope that’s exactly what I can do. I hope she will not feel like a second-class citizen involved in something called a `domestic partnership.’ ”

This Valentine’s Day, a day devoted to the often indecipherable tugs of the heart, comes just after Gov. Christine Gregoire signed into law a measure making Washington the seventh state to allow gays to marry. The bill became law, as happened in New York State’s passage last year, because a handful of Republicans broke ranks with their party.

Gregoire, a Roman Catholic and a Democrat, herself broke with the teachings of her church. She said she could no longer, in good conscience, oppose letting certain people get married. She praised her daughters for bringing her around.

“It’s a day that historians will mark as a milestone for equal rights, when we did what was right, just and fair and did it together, Republicans and Democrats, gay and straight, young and old,” Gregoire said, at the bill signing on Monday.

In Santorum’s view, all of this is evidence of societal collapse, a nation unmoored from its moral anchor. The implication of his position is that gays should return to the closet, leading secretive lives, out in the cold, away from the embrace of their families. He threw his lot in with people in this state who have vowed to overturn same-sex marriage by referendum in November.

Don’t bank on it. The near future will be populated by those who share the beliefs of Gregoire’s daughters and by those who will come to see the wisdom of a lonely widow who thought hard about the meaning of love.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/a-widows-wisdom/