10/26/2006

Sad that quest for happiness stirs anger

By Kathy Gibbons
Features editor

It was a Sunday morning. I'd been off all week and came in to catch up. With 600 e-mail messages piled up, just getting them all loaded and deleting the junk is a big thing.

I was the only one here when the newsroom phone rang. The man didn't identify himself, but launched into a rant about that day's Northern Living feature about gay couples who marry or make formal commitments. He said the story was "sick" and had no business being there.

"You people have absolutely no concept of what a newspaper should be," he said.

He never let me get a word in. At one point, he said, "You probably have no say in how these decisions are made anyway." Before I could respond, he kept talking, finally sneering before he hung up, "And you can pass this on to old Billy Boy," referring to our editor, Bill Thomas.

His vitriol left a bad taste, but I didn't think about it again until that night while reading the Detroit paper. I grew up in Detroit and sometimes scan the obituaries. Pictures, especially, attract my attention when they are of people who look too young to be there.

Well, this time there was a photo of a smiling woman, age 38. Listed first among the survivors, who included her loving parents, siblings and aunts, was her "life partner Tania."

Hmmm, I thought. Would the man who called this morning begrudge this dead woman the love she experienced in her short lifetime?

Then another picture caught my eye. It was of a 32-year-old man, in uniform. He died in Iraq, leaving a family as well.

Now HERE is something to rant about, I thought. Why doesn't that caller, so angry at the thought of a gay couple trying to quietly make a life together, get enraged instead at the burgeoning number of people dying and maimed every day in Iraq, with no end in sight? I put the paper down, discouraged, and thought more about him.

While he didn't give me the chance to tell him, he was wrong about me having no say in that story. "Old Billy Boy" didn't choose to put that story in the paper. I did.

The Northern Living cover is dedicated to stories about life, and I assign the stories that run there. We'd recently run a wedding announcement for the couple who ended up being pictured in the story he was so angry about. (Our policy is to publish announcements of any legal marriage, period.)

Seeing their wedding announcement reminded me we hadn't done anything on gay marriage since it became legal in a few places. And gay men and women, who live and love and are as likely to contribute to society as anyone else, are part of life.

What I don't get is how someone decides it's his right to decree they don't deserve to be.

(A note about last week's column: In a list of things people told me they have learned, the use of the word comprise was incorrect in the print edition. Comprise means to contain, as in "the zoo comprises many animals.")