Amendment Won; We Lose

This week, two significant things happened that have been rattling around in my head.  My daughter finished her freshman year at college and North Carolina passed Amendment One.  

In case you have been living under a rock, Amendment One is an amendment to the North Carolina state constitution outlawing same-sex marriages.  I must admit that the passage of this amendment shocked me.  I figured that by 2012, we as a society had evolved sufficiently that we would no longer try to use law and politics to enforce ‘vanilla'.  Have we not learned from history what comes of placing legislative and constitutional bans on human freedoms?  When I consider the human and financial resources that were expended in service of this effort, I wonder what it could have bought in terms of feeding the homeless, or drug prevention efforts.

I confess that I was raised in an environment where” traditional” values were embraced, expressing dislike or distrust for ideas and people that looked or acted different.  This point of view was not reserved for same-sex couples; it applied to racial, religious, economic, and geographic differences as well.  I would describe the behavior as “tribal” in that disdain for others created unity within the fold.  And it was done loudly.  There is a deeply held conviction that the ability to express one’s opinion is an inalienable right.  As a kid, I usually found myself on the wrong side of those opinions, which caused me to grow up questioning why my opinions were not also entitled to be celebrated. 

 

Sexual orientation is something my generation was slow to understand.  I believe that someday I will tell my grandchildren that “once upon a time” all families had to have a mommy and a daddy the same way I described the societal sins of racial prejudice to my children.  Say what we will about being a melting pot, committed to democracy, and a land of opportunity, we continue to be a narrow-minded and intolerant nation.  And when intolerance to others’ beliefs and practices gives birth to a constitutional ban, my stomach turns over.   

So what does any of this have to do with my daughter, who just came home from college?  There was a final project in one of her architecture classes where she, a freshman, was assigned to a senior in order to do an analysis of his thesis project.  The senior’s project was a memorial located on an abandoned island with decaying ruins of a former facility for addicts and the insane.  His design was “argued” by deriving meaning from the decay itself, creating an architecture (yes, they say it that way) at a site where, by design, eventually there would be no remaining structures.   I have not done this young man’s project justice, but suffice it to say that he was awarded the Faculty Prize for best thesis.

I thought it a curious thing that we live in a world where “architecture” can evolve from Greek temples to Gothic cathedrals to Versailles to the Seagram Building to the Disney Concert Hall to a prize-winning architectural thesis without walls or structure.  This evolution bends every preconceived notion about what we consider architecture to be.  On the other hand, we cannot open our minds and our hearts to allow any two people the rights and benefits of marriage.   Maybe it is high time our society found itself some intelligent design.