He also has an interesting take about America's stance on gay marriage and equality rights in general:
UPDATE: Now I am reading an article about this story and similar stories, and it's bringing tears to my eyes.
Such was the case with Sharon Reed, another Washington resident who said she was repeatedly told to leave her dying partner's hospital room by a "temporary" night nurse in 2005.
Reed, who, like Langbehn, had all the legal directives to serve as her partner's health proxy, has filed a lawsuit against the employment agency that hired the nurse at Seattle's University of Washington Medical Center.
...
"The day before Jo died, she told me, 'I'm scared, don't leave me,'" said Reed, now 70 and a psychotherapist. "I promised I would stay with her, but every time I tried to see Jo [the nurse] would scream at me to get out of the room, 'You don't belong here.' She was very hostile from the beginning."
...
Today, Reed told ABCNews.com that she felt she had let her partner down at the end of life.
"Ours was the kind of relationship had been a dream of a lifetime for both of us," said Reed. "We had spent the last 17 years, buying a home, raising a child, being successful in our careers, having loyal friends and sharing time with our families."
"We absolutely adored each other and everybody knew it," she said.
There's nothing here that couldn't be rectified by the legal documents to allow access...
ReplyDeleteIn this case where there is an individual who denied access, that person can be held liable...it's called 'tort' law, look it up...
None of this emotional nonsense requires the overturning of reason itself and bastardizing the definition of marriage by including men with men and women with women...
Anonymous-
ReplyDeleteEmotional arguments can indeed be harmful in the sense that people can be manipulated into bad decisions. On the other hand, arguments appealing to sympathy toward other humans can also function as a check on the sort of violent, divisive ideologies that have been proposed and practiced by avowed rationalists in the past. People who champion reason itself often fail to notice that their ideals carry many unexamined assumptions.
The purpose of the emotional arguments given in this post is to help people overcome prejudices and see these couples as humans like themselves, hence deserving of equal treatment. These prejudices often arise just because we grow up in environments where few people are openly gay, and we mentally place them in an out-group, viewing them as strangers. Appealing to pure reason is not in general the most effective way to put an end to prejudice, since extended logical arguments tend to be rather unconvincing when applied to real-world situations - one requires very strong assumptions to work rigorously, most people aren't trained to process long logical chains, and a skilled adversary could easily introduce rhetorical sleights of hand to misdirect a train of thought. That said, we can think of appeals to sympathy as a way to break down barriers to reasoned thought. Experiments have shown that people have a strong tendency to reject logical conclusions that run counter to their prejudices, and it can be quite effective to employ a strong emotional appeal to inject some uncertainty into someone's (possibly illogical) convictions.
One point that stuck out in your comment was your attachment to the definition of marriage. Why is it so important to you that society's use of this word remain completely immutable? In particular, do you have a realistic model of society in which a broadening of the definition to include same-sex couples of consenting adults is likely to cause massive harm?
Religious nuts need to wake up! You all are spreading hate and bigotry in the name of God! You will be taken when the Rapture happens. Pack your bags...
ReplyDeleteEach to their own I say.
ReplyDelete