Thoughts in a Haystack

Friends, I need to speak with you tonight about a serious medical crisis America is now facing: PMEDS!

Over the past few months and, particularly, over the last week a significant number of Americans have come down with Post Marriage Equality Derangement Syndrome.

The symptoms are striking and tragic. People with PMEDS begin to babble irrationally and incessantly. What they say has almost nothing to do with reality as everyone else experiences it.

Linda Harvey has a particularly severe case.

It seems that a street photographer came across a young teary-eyed boy sitting on a stoop, took his picture and posted it on Facebook and asked him what was wrong. The boy replied "I'm homosexual and I'm afraid about what my future will be and that people won't like me."

One of the quirks of PMEDS is that there are glimpses of sanity that, nonetheless, then plunge headlong off a cliff into uncontrolled fantasy. For instance, Harvey grasps that a child that young probably doesn't understand what 'being gay' is all about, much less be capable of recognizing that he is, in fact, gay. But, then, Harvey leaps to the conclusion that the boy is a victim of child molestation. A more than equally possible explanation is that the boy has been bullied and taunted by his peers, because of some mannerism or his appearance, with the label 'gay' that they understand no better than the boy himself.

Then Harvey is stripped by PMEDS of any resemblance of reality: It seems that former First Lady, former Secretary of State and present candidate for President, Hillary Clinton, noticed the Facebook page and left this message:

Prediction from a grown-up: Your future is going to be amazing. You will surprise yourself with what you’re capable of and the incredible things you go on to do. Find the people who love and believe in you – there will be lots of them.

Harvey's reaction is about as far from reality as anyone could get:

No one is officially calling Hillary’s encouragement of homosexual identity and feelings in an eight-year-old child corruption, which is still a crime in most states. But they should be.

Of course, to those not suffering from PMEDS, nothing in Clinton's message constituted “encouragement of homosexual identity and feelings.” It was a simple message that what might seem to be horrible now will not seem the same tomorrow; that you have an entire future to look forward to; and that there are and will be people who love and believe in you. It would have been an entirely appropriate message to a child who was crying because he thought he was ugly or unatheletic or any of the other “failings” that children of that age think they're afflicted by.

To put an exclamation point to Harvey's flight from reality, she says:

[Clinton is] not alone in her unverifiable discovery of innate “gay”-ness.

Just last week, the editors of USA Today wrote this: “Modern science has concluded that sexual orientation, like race, is genetically determined and the court held that it deserves the same constitutional protection afforded to other immutable characteristics.”

Say again? What “science”? Quote us chapter and verse. They won’t because they can’t. It doesn’t exist.

Of course, the basic premise is unrealistic. We in the US don't just protect people from discrimination because of their “innate” characteristics. After all, nothing in any particular religion or sect a person chooses is “innate.” People can and frequently do change their religion but we nonetheless protect them from discrimination based on whatever temporary choice they have made.

More importantly, no matter how deep Harvey may bury her fingers in her ears, how tight shut she screws her eyes and how loud she hums “Nearer My God to Thee,” the simple fact is that the people who are, unlike Harvey, experts in the field, such as the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association and a host of other scientific and medical authorities are confident, based on reams of evidence, that sexual orientation is “an enduring disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions to men, women, or both.”

In short, Harvey isn't within spittin' distance of reality.

Unfortunately, there is no cure for PMEDS. The best treatment to date is to simply let the syndrome run its course. Eventually, as the gap between the sufferer's beliefs and the real world becomes wider and the delusional predicted outcomes fail to materialize, the most extreme symptoms, while not disappearing, become muted and are mostly only expressed while in the company of other PMEDS sufferers.

It is a sad state of affairs but the most we can do for PMEDS sufferers is to go about our daily life in the real world and try not to point and laugh at them too much.