Dartblog

“I want to strangle them.”

San Francisco’s NPR affiliate is KQED. Its breath reaches down the peninsula to Silicon Valley. This morning it carried a remarkable commentary from a man called Tom Perrault, a California attorney who found himself disappointed by California’s vote to amend its constitution to define marriage in the old-timey way. And not just disappointed—but angry.

In high school I worked for a major FM radio station. One nearly as large as KQED and one prone to controversy. Yet never once on our air did we carry anything like this.

Naturally when one invests so much of one’s self in the profundity of one’s sexual preferences, one is bound to be disappointed when they are not likewise exalted by the middling electorate. A dispiriting defeat? Proposition 8 was, for evangelist-types, I suppose. But that it seems to have moved so many to actual agitation might be as clear an explication as any for the disinterest ordinary voters have registered in the throes of the alternative-lifestyle set.

The vigors of the public are limited. Affairs like total economic infarctions and clashes of civilizations tend to tucker them out. Not to mention that the sort of narrowness of interest displayed by Mr. Perrault does nothing to produce empathy for his cause. And now I am done, and Mr. Perrault may strangle me.

(The continuation of the piece follows.)