Speak Out Against Silence

Whilst I was on my way home....

I love living in Alaska.  It's sights like this that sustain me, even during the long dark winters.

 The stark contrast between snow and spruce and the gentle contrast between earth and sky play havoc with your perception.  Things take on a ghostly, spectral appearance, as if you were in Tir-na-nog, or Alfheim.

Everything takes on soft edges when covered with snow and even the ground looks pillowy.  Standing in the open, no walls, no buildings, nothing but the trees and the sky and the snow, is an ethereal feeling, the skyline blurs, and the earth runs into the sky.

At night, the contrast becomes even more pronounced and the snow reflects the city lights reflected off the cloud cover.  At midnight on a dark night on the edge of town, everything takes on a violet tinge.  The horizon takes on a razor sharpness and the line between the heavens and the earth become as night and day.

While the green of summer and the gold of autumn are beautiful to behold, it's the white and black of winter that makes the minute amount of color present shine like jewels against velvet.

Either black or white.

Why is this even a question still?

I was roaming around the darker recesses of the internet when I stumbled across this infographic.  I thought it might be of some interest to you (click to embiggen).

As you can see it's a flowchart that was compiled from the comments on a Facebook poll.  It details the assorted arguments over same-sex marriage.  This particular argument is one of the things that makes me contemptuous of conservatives in general and republicans in specific.  Not that liberals/democrats are any better.

What it comes down to is, under our social contract (i.e. the U.S. Constitution) no person has the right to force another to live by a moral code not of their choosing.  An ethical code yes, but not a moral one.  That means that if I choose to marry a woman, a man, an eighteen year old or an eighty year old, it's no bloody business of yours.  So long as I violate no municipal, state or federal ordinance, I may do as I wish.  Any attempt to infringe on that, is a violation of the social contract.

Plus it really pisses me off.