Photo credit: Andy Dingley
I don’t know why I imagine anyone wants to know what I think. And yet I send out these posts, like a man throwing small stones into the ocean. Perhaps it’s just for the sake of the mental discipline it takes to put my thoughts in organized form.
Anyway, in case you’ve been waiting for my opinion of the recent Supreme Court rulings on same sex marriage, here it is. I hear the sound of a “click.”
That click is the noise of a ratchet. The metaphor of the ratchet, not at all original to me, is a very good one, I think, for understanding social change.
A ratchet does not move smoothly. Sometimes it stops, and every now and then it goes backwards for just a moment. But the main movement of a ratchet is always in one direction.
The Supreme Court decisions on same sex marriage were a ratcheting up of the mechanism. We lost another half inch or so that we’re not likely to get back. Continue reading The sound of a click