After reading Seattle resident Dan Thies’ letter to The Mirror on July 1, I finally felt moved to write on what is obviously a touchy subject.
Several years ago my darling wee Irish mother who lived with me was reading the Reader’s Digest as I read the morning paper. She suddenly put the magazine upside down, causing me to look up into her beautiful, teary eyed and stricken face. Then she got up and quietly went to her room. I went to her chair at our breakfast table, turned the book over and read. The brief article was from a daughter describing her love for her mother by sharing her last moments with her, who at one point said “Honey, you have so many things to do, you don’t have to sit here with me all the time.” Her daughter leaned over and, stroking her brow, said, “My dear, I want the last thing you see to be the face of someone who loves you.”
Just try not to collapse on that one! I vowed then and there to do everything in my power to see that I could do that for my darling mother. I have a lesbian niece whom I adore and who my mother called OF — for Old Faithful. She is a fantastic nurse and is especially good with elder care and routinely cries for three or four days every time she loses a client. She is, truly, the finest human being I know and also suffers from scrupulosity. How many of us have “that” ailment anymore? Because of her help, I was able to fulfill my hope and had the devastating privilege of holding my mother as she died. She opened her eyes, looked into the face that so loved her, smiled, and then left me. Now. My lesbian niece whom I call “MOF” now for “my old faithful,” has the right to every protection and right and privilege the rest of us have. I can’t imagine how that can even be in contention. However, and MOF understands me, the domestic partnership bill, but not the title marriage, is absolutely and indisputably the proper legal be-all-end-all. Otherwise, the hidden agenda in the demands by the obviously radical faction, the title “marriage” is the cache of normalness with which they hope to clothe themselves (the radicals) and, I’m sorry, but in all common sense, that just won’t wash. How are you going to multiply? And bag adoption, that’s not normal either. And don’t go off on some tangent here as both my loving and wonderful sons are adopted, and no, that’s not normal. I have never been interested in questioning the motives of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), and you’ll notice Mr. Thies didn’t define that for us, just tossed it out there. I might add threatening to expose names on petitions has influenced me, and no, I have signed nothing.
You, Mr. Thies and associates, have achieved virtual equality, and have, indeed, every right to those equalities, and, congratulations. But marriage? No. And all the labeling in the world won’t make these unions normal. Loving and good and deserving of all due respect, yes. Normal, no.
Clara McArthur, Federal Way
