Aspiring lawyer changes mind on homophobia

The law student who failed the Bar exam and then sued the Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners and Massachusetts State Supreme Court over what he perceived to be a ‘morally repugnant’ question about gay marriage has since changed his views, apologised, and dropped the lawsuit.

Dunne, an Irish immigrant who first came to the United States in 1998, said the change also was prompted in part by racism the Irish once faced in the United States, his six-year stint in the US Army, and the war in Iraq.

“Members of the gay community are in combat and dying for their country, and yet they’re being denied the basic human rights they are fighting for,” he said.

Sacrilege! Heresy! Flip-flopping! Everybody knows that in the modern world of today you’re not allowed to hold multiple opinions at different points in your life. Opinions are sacrosanct, inviolable, immutable, and any previous opinion you ever had must always be held against you for the rest of your life. If you wrote on a piece of construction paper in kindergarten ‘I hate spiders’ you must never switch to liking spiders, for ever and aye, amen. And if you write ‘I want to be president of the United States of America’ on that same piece of paper in kindergarten, you can bet your Velcro sneakers that it will be taken as dispositive proof that you are an insatiable, power-hungry, tyrannical dictator in the making.

The cynical reading, of course, is that he realised he was going to look like a homophobe and a bigot when applying for jobs, so he saw which way the wind was blowing and switched sides. But I’ll be more charitable with my judgement. Lee Swislow says so, anyway, and she’s the executive director of an organisation called ‘Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders’ (nothing in that organisation name about the protecting the polysyndeton of ampersands, apparently).