Open Letter to Sen. Ruben Diaz, Sr.: We Hope You Live a Long, Happy Life
Dear Senator Rev. Ruben Diaz, Sr.:
I have read your open letter addressed to "The Editors of the Village Voice."
As you noticed, in a recent update to this blog by Steven Thrasher on how irrelevant you are becoming in New York's inexorable move to making marriage equality a reality in this state, I put a rather salacious headline on the piece: "Ruben Diaz, Sr.: Gay Marriage Over My Dead Body."
I wrote that headline in an attempt not only to get attention to Thrasher's reasoned, well-reported post, but also to characterize just how out of step with reality your opposition to gay marriage has become in a city where the national movement for gay rights began.
I did not, however, actually wish you dead, and if some of our commenters were similarly hyperbolic in their denunciations of you, I consider that unfortunate.
No, there certainly is no desire on my part or on the part of the Voice to hope for your early demise. In fact, you provide for us a valuable service, reminding us of how backward and mean-spirited many people in this country, and even many people in this otherwise enlightened city, are about human rights and basic human dignity.
The Voice in general, and Steven Thrasher in particular, has provided example after example of how loving, committed couples are denied the most basic of human rights because of bizarre and hate-filled screeds by the shortsighted emotional midgets of this country, of which you make a most convenient and visible example.
For that reason, if for no other, we want you to be around after the more responsible members of our political leadership adopt gay marriage, and for a long, long time after that.
So that we may never forget.
Sincerely,
Tony Ortega
Editor
The Village Voice
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