Christ Dodd Comes Out - For Gay Marriage

When I wrote my post the other day saying that we have to keep pressing our leaders on gay rights isssues, this is the kind of thing I was hoping for - a statement issued today by Senator Chris Dodd:

I believe that effective leaders must be able and willing to grow and change over their service. I certainly have during mine – and so has the world. Thirty-five years ago, who could have imagined that we’d have an African-American President of the United States?

My young daughters are growing up in a different reality than I did. Our family knows many same-sex couples – our neighbors in Connecticut, members of my staff, parents of their schoolmates. Some are now married because the Connecticut Supreme Court and our state legislature have made same-sex marriage legal in our state.

But to my daughters, these couples are married simply because they love each other and want to build a life together. That’s what we’ve taught them. The things that make those families different from their own pale in comparison to the commitments that bind those couples together.

And, really, that’s what marriage should be. It’s about rights and responsibilities and, most of all, love.

I believe that, when my daughters grow up, barriers to marriage equality for same-sex couples will seem as archaic, and as unfair, as the laws we once had against inter-racial marriage.

And I want them to know that, even if he was a little late, their dad came down on the right side of history.

Good for him. It's always hard to admit that you have changed your mind, with the implicit suggestion that you were wrong before. There are good men and women - Democrats AND Republicans, who may be open to having thier minds changed on this issue, if we politely keep telling them the truth as we see it.

By the way - Senator Dodd is facing a tough re-election fight next year. Now might be a good time to send him some money to help keep his voice in the Senate. Hint, hint.