Rights and Tolerance

This is going to have to be shorter than I would like it to be but Laura and I have been thinking and talking about this a lot lately and I thought I would share a few of our thoughts and a good article that will make you think about it. As I am sure most of you know California, Florida, and Arizona all have propositions to constitutionalize marriage as being between a man and a woman. The church is strongly supporting these propositions and has laid out their reasoning clearly on lds.org.

One of the many issues that has been brought up is that defining marriage more liberally as between any two people will clash with the freedoms of churches and parents. That is what the article I have linked to this blog is talking about. (Click on the Title and you will go to the article) It's really a very interesting topic that forces one to re-evaluate freedom and what it means.

Laura and I watched a little clip of an interview with Elder Bednar where he talked about the issue. One of the main points he made was that tolerance has to be a two way street and it seems often times people want it to be a one way street. The Gay-rights movement is fighting very hard to have equal rights, but they seem to look past the fact that their fight for rights is tromping on the rights of religions to believe and practice as they would like. But that is the big question whose rights should be protected?

I am sure that after reading the article some of you thought that the Catholic church having to pull their adoption services out of Massachuset because they wouldn't place babies with homosexual couples, or a woman being sued because she wasn't willing to photograph a gay-couples wedding, sounds pretty ridiculous. Now think about similar issues but now imagine them being about race, or gender (women's rights). What if a woman today chose not to photograph a black couples wedding, or if the Catholic church refused to place children in African-American homes? I think our first reaction would be to say "but that's different," and I think that they are but the issues are similar. When should a church have the right to prevent someone from joining, or when should a photographer be able to chose who they photograph? The line is not black and white and I am afraid we are going to just keeping moving closer and closer to everyone and everything having legal rights to anything that they want. "I was treated unfairly, I should be able to sue, or the government should force them to let me do what I want" will become the way we think as Americans. I don't know what the solution is, but I what I do know is that not everyone can be satisfied. It seems to me that we should protect the rights of the largest amount of people that we can. In this case, those of us who believe that marriage is between a man and woman and cannot be anything else. This is why America is so great, in a few days there will be a vote and the majority will have their way!

Our Story

Enjoy the story of our life so far. The apartment at the beginning is the apartment we lived in in Provo, not our apartment in Glendale.