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" Can anyone &amp;#039;splain to me why in hell this story was on the front page this morning of The Washington Post, a formerly great newspaper now functioning as a satellite property of the educational testing industry? It couldn&amp;#039;t be that the paper was trying to &amp;quot;balance&amp;quot; all those lovely photos and heartwarming stories produced in and around the Supreme Court last week, could it? Perish the thought. And so, three days after the U.S. Supreme Court legally bolstered same-sex marriage and at a time when a majority of Americans accept the idea, a wedding was underway among people who do not. The place was a horse farm in Wilsonville, a town that advertises itself as &amp;quot;family-centered,&amp;quot; which is understood to be husband-and-wife-centered. The county was Shelby, one of the most conservative counties in the country. The state was Alabama, where the constitution denies recognition of same-sex marriages or any union &amp;quot;seeking to replicate marriage,&amp;quot; which it defines as a &amp;quot;a sacred covenant, solemnized between a man and a woman,&amp;quot; which is exactly what the couple and most of their guests believed it was. (And BTW, WaPo, it might have been appropriate to mention at some point in the story that Shelby County also figured rather prominently in another Supreme Court case last week, in which the god-written right of white people to suppress votes was brought back for another trip around the track.) The story and its placement makes even less sense when you realize that, by and large, the folks in it are pretty much on the live-and-let-live side of things. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not surprised about the social changes,&amp;quot; said Ross Grimball, 51, who has been married for 25 years. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a paradigm shift. It&amp;#039;s going to be different.&amp;quot; His friend Dee, who had been married to her husband for 26 years, nodded. &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s happening is not going to change what we believe,&amp;quot; said Dee, who declined to have her last name used because of family sensitivities. She said the issue was personal since she has a close relative who is gay. &amp;quot;I had family members who wouldn&amp;#039;t let him in the house, and I said, &amp;#039;No, no, no, we love you, we are not going to let this issue come between us.&amp;#039; Spiritually we are polar opposites, but I love him. So, I mean, yeah. This is who we are and what we believe, and I think it is important to have conversations.&amp;quot;Brynn Marcum, 23, married two years to her husband, Zach, said that her generation is less threatened by same-sex marriage than her parents were, though she is no less committed to what she considers the same Christian values. &amp;quot;We are not going to go picket against gay marriage,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;We are going to bring the example to people by who we are.&amp;quot; And who they were, added Zach, were sinners just like everybody else. &amp;quot;If someone wants to call us bigots, it&amp;#039;s like, well, then we&amp;#039;ve got to go back 1,000 steps and find some common ground,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Like, maybe we&amp;#039;re all broken. Maybe everybody&amp;#039;s screwed up.&amp;quot; I love it when big-city newspapers go exploring on extended sociological expeditions among the wilds where the common folk live, especially when the latter decline to play their foreordained roles. If that&amp;#039;s the general attitude among dedicated 20-ish evangelical Christians in Shelby County fking Alabama, then this &amp;quot;debate&amp;quot; has been settled for years. Good luck, you two. Most gay couples I know would wish you very much the same. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18924/a-wedding-in-shelby-county/>