The Union Leader has made a cause célèbre out of the sex education manual, "Mutual Caring, Mutual Sharing," distributed by the family planning clinic in Dover. The clinic's sin is that it spoke positively about homosexuality and lesbianism in a curriculum about sexuality. The Union Leader, in the words of editor Joseph McQuade, has called the manual "pro-homosexual propaganda," "moral rot," "warped thinking," and "garbage," because it doesn't conform to, in Jim Finnegan's words, "certain immutable moral standards."
The Union Leader usually enjoys trashing people who hold views different than its own. When it does this it likes to believe it's protecting sacred honor. But the Union Leader's vision of the world, like the vision of many conservatives, is rooted in fear and contempt, in a loathing for tolerance and change. Because Finnegan, McQuade, and company can't bring themselves to enlarge their own sympathies, they turn their bigotries into principle and believe that name-calling is the same thing as reasoned analysis. This only shows that they're really not interested in protecting freedom and morality, only in quashing the freedom and moral beliefs of people with whom they disagree.
And, as usual, the Union Leader has missed the point. What is most important is not what people choose to be sexually but whether or not such sexual choices allow people to lead lives capable of affection, understanding, and growth. If a person chooses to love another human being, be it a man or a woman, the salient point is that the person can love, not the gender of the partner. We should be doing everything to promote such affection between human beings, including talking about the fact, as the clinic's manual does, that some people wish to love in a way different from the way Jim Finnegan wishes to love.
In the end, it's really a lack of love that prompts the Union Leader and those who agree with it to be as crass and frigid as they are. And this, in turn, can only lead to oppression and intolerance, as it has already in the office of the governor. John Sununu, because he thinks the manual was "inappropriate," wants to pursue legal action against the clinic, even though they've committed no crime and had the right to create the manual they did - in other words, to use the state's power to shut the clinic up. Normally, Finnegan would be riding the First Amendment hard, as he did on behalf of the students at the Dartmouth Review. But here he doesn't, agreeing editorially with Sununu, and thus revealing that for Finnegan, the First Amendment protects his "immutable standards" but not those of any who disagree with him. This mean-spirited and ignorant abuse has to stop -- right now, right here.
Koppelization
Voices From The Street