This week's Independent

Some weeks, I skim through The Raleigh Independent and nothing catches my interest. Other weeks, I find it chockful of interesting stuff - some of if quite bloggable. This week's issue is one of those.

This article about legal steps same-sex couples can take to get protections similar to heterosexual marriages is quite useful and informative. It is also cool it mentions Pam Spaulding and her blog.

In the same issue, an article, Family Values?, looks at another angle - the plight of straight people devastated by the coming-out-of-closet by their spouses who, due to religious upbringing, got married despite knowing they were gay:

Twenty-one years ago, I was a bright-eyed young woman who was in love with a handsome, albeit serious, young man. We married, then had a baby, and I expected to live happily ever after. We lived in a conservative, mostly fundamentalist Christian community at the heart of a mostly conservative, fundamentalist state. Homosexuals were not discussed except in derogatory terms, with the term "abominations before God" being used whenever the topic did arise.

Ten years into the marriage, it was revealed to this bride, who was still very much in love with her husband (though he was often distant and depressed) that he had a "terrible secret." He was gay. He had fought that fact all of his life. When he met me, he knew that he was gay, but he thought he could change--that God would heal him. And the alternative--coming out as a gay man--could get him killed. Certainly it would mean he would be shunned by his congregation, his friends and possibly his family.

Read the rest...

Barbara Solow finds John Edwards uncomfortable in too-white, too-upper-class society.

And, I still want to see Science of Sleep, though interestingly, Fellerath does not even mention insomnia - the main character in the movie.