Challenging Norms

Everyone is born into a time and place on Earth. The setting for which your time is spent is based on the evolution of your environment up until your birth and the continuation of such as your life plays out. It is not just the turn from monkey into man that represents evolutionary change. It also encompasses changes in ideals, challenging of norms, and striving towards understanding. Being ignorant to truths is not necessarily a shameful thing. While it is true that the world has always been round, it existed as flat in the collective consciousness for generations. No harm, no foul. Generations later had the luxury of having the truth as knowledge and all of the other findings that continue to be aided by it. However, a shameful act would be to torture and imprison the person that had the insight and human curiosity to challenge the old belief. That is what allegedly happened to Galileo Galilei in 1633 by the order of Pope Urban VIII who, for whatever ideological or political reasoning, would not accept the change (The New York Times, 1878).

Galileo had the courage to challenge an idea so grand and vital to the understanding of life itself: the ground we walk on; the sky we gaze at; the forces that keep us grounded. So what is the big deal about marriage? Is the concept of two people getting hitched as scary and sacred a concept as having the idea of our world almost literally flipped upside down? In our time and place, there is a fight over who has the right to wed. That is not to say there is a fight over who is intelligent enough, who has proved themselves to be mature enough, or even who has established a long enough relationship to take it to the marriage level. The battle is being fought on a more basic level than that. The fight is about whether legally practicing homosexuals should be allowed to marry their partners in the same way that legal practicing heterosexuals can. And while Galileo had to endure physical torture for his personal obligation to science and understanding, the homosexual community today faces the torture of being denied a basic civil right.

References
The New York Times, (1878, March 24). Was Galileo tortured? Retrieved June 9, 2009, from http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F0CE4D6113FE63BBC4C51DF B5668383669FDE