Americans are too fat, experts say. The debate on gay marriage suggests we may be growing fat-headed as well.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics predict 42 percent of the population will be obese by 2030, with 11 percent severely obese, at health care costs of $550 billion.
How do we set the price of moral obesity, as reflected in the uproar over the President’s conversion into a supporter of gay marriage?
Just as we have been stuffing our bodies with too much poor nourishment and exercising them too little, are we doing the same with our minds and hearts?
In this election year, opinions are as ubiquitous as fast food and most are just as nourishing. Political debate swerves from contraception to the sanctity of marriage in an eyeblink, although neither subject is on the legislative agenda after a meaningless North Carolina vote Tuesday.
Yet, a New York Times editorial asserts that the President “took the moral high ground on what may be the great civil rights struggle of our time” while other pundits calculate both the timing and political impact of his coming out on the issue.
Where is all this litmus-testing on issues great and small taking America? What was wrong with the President’s previous “Yes, but” position on gay marriage? What’s next on the agenda for splitting us into “for” and “against” factions?
Human beings have doubts, ambivalence, uncertainties, zigzags, and, yes, prejudices on many questions. That’s what makes them human.
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