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How does one celebrate and mourn at the same time?

I’ve known my friend Gary Beuschel since high school. Then, as now, he was a person of integrity. Her wrote this as a letter to a local newspaper in San Francisco this week, and was kind enough to let me reproducing it here. As last week proved to us (both in Arkansas and around the country) bigotry is still alive and well in America.

How does one celebrate and mourn at the same time?

 How does one celebrate and mourn at the same time? It's ironic that on the day we see a historic refutal of past discrimination against one group, we vote to discriminate anew against another group. I am intensely sad that a basic human right was even put to the vote, and I am sadder still that my fellow Californians have voted to put discrimination into our Constitution.

My partner and I have been together for fifteen years. We held a commitment ceremony in 1998. In 2003, we celebrated the birth of our now five-year-old twin daughters. We married on Valentine's Day in 2004. And we married again last week on Halloween. I expect there will soon be a lawsuit to nullify all the same-sex marriages which have been performed in the past five months. I have no doubt we shall overcome, but how do we keep track of all our anniversaries?
 Gary Beuschel
San Francisco

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On the Air with Aubrey Shepherd

On Monday, Aubrey Shepherd will appear as a guest on my program.

Shepherd is a long-time outdoor writer, and having written for several major Arkansas newspapers. He is also a popular writer on Fayetteville politics. One of his major concerns is local conservation.

He maintains several blogs about Fayetteville, which contain many of his photographs. Here are just two of them.

www.aubreyshepherd.blogspot.com
www.aubunique.com/blog.
Showings:

Monday -  7pm
Tuesday - noon
Saturday - 6pm

*****
Quote of the Day

Language may die at the hands of the schoolmen; it is regenerated by the poets. - Emmanuel Mounier, "Be Not Afraid"

rsdrake@nwark.com

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