Hooray for Robert Whitcomb!

I only read the online version, so I may have missed something, and it must be remembered that we're talking about a holiday Monday, but it appears that Providence Journal editorial page editor, Robert Whitcomb, has recognized the tremendous gap in his paper's coverage of the gay marriage issue. First, he himself has raised a question that his peers in the Rhode Island media have declined to mention:

The gay-marriage issue has emitted a copious quantity of glibness -- such as the suggestion that couples of two men or of two women are pretty much like couples of a man and a woman when it comes to raising children, or any of the other laborious duties of spousedom. After all, men and women are differentiated merely by minor issues of plumbing. Right?

His whole piece is worth reading (and shows evidence of a much more politic mindset than I imagine I'd manage in his social environment). Second, he printed a piece by Rabbi Avi Shafran that suggests that the movement pushing for (what they claim as) equality in the eyes of the law won't stop at that:

Either morality has true meaning and trumps what some people, even many people, wish to do, or it does not. And if moral scruples are indeed conceptually devolved into bigotry, there will be not only denigration and derision of traditionalists, but also discrimination and legal action against them -- as Christopher Kempling's treatment and Connecticut's action against the Boy Scouts well demonstrate.

Kempling is the teacher in British Columbia who was punished by his school for sending letters critical of homosexuality to his local paper. Said a judge in the Supreme Court:

Discriminatory speech is incompatible with the search for truth. In addition, [Mr. Kempling's] publicly discriminatory writings undermine the ability of members of the targeted group, homosexuals, to attain individual self-fulfillment.

Apparently, "the truth" is a category of information to which the B.C. Supreme Court is privvy. We can't afford to ignore the echo that the reference to homosexuals' "self-fulfillment" finds in U.S. gay marriage advocates who declare the right to marry as a prerequisite to being "fully human."