Briccetti Writes Against Proposition 8 in Los Angeles Times

Katherine A. Briccetti, a school psychologist in the Bay Area and an author, had a piece published in the Los Angeles Times today that was mainly an appeal to emotion regarding the trial against the California Marriage Amendment.

She writes about how she was "straight", was "appalled" when she saw two men kiss each other (she calls them gay, but did she really know? - maybe they were bisexual), and that she "recoiled" when a woman she identifies as a lesbian brushed up against her at work. Sounds like sexual harassment, if not oversensitivity on Briccetti's part. Later on in the piece, she talks about how, as a girl, she had crushes on boys and infatuations with male rock stars. Ah, but...

When, nine years later, I broke up with my fiance and fell in love with a woman, I was astounded.

So - sexual orientation is changeable?

[Much, much more after the jump - click below.]

In the late 1980s, lesbian and gay couples were just beginning to celebrate unions in churches and temples, but it wasn't common practice.

So they are possible without a state license, contrary to what activists and sympathetic media pieces imply.

My lover, Pam, and I exchanged vows, and gold and black jade wedding bands, at a secluded spot on a ridge overlooking the Pacific Ocean, our only witnesses that day a flock of terns sweeping past.

Are you next going to argue that ceremonies shouldn't have to be witnessed to be licensed? I mean, some people like their privacy and all, and some people have personality disorders that drive friends and families away, so perhaps we should remove the requirement of having a witness.

On a city street, I sometimes wondered if a posse carrying baseball bats, wool hats covering their faces, would follow us after a late movie: Teach you lezzies a lesson.

It didn't happen, did it? Thank God.

We registered as domestic partners with the state of California and visited the sperm bank to make our two children.

So they deliberately sought to conceive children in a way that would deprive them of a father. This is just one reason why I urge men: never donate sperm.

Then, when our eldest went off to preschool, we discovered he was the envy of his classmates for having two moms.

So far, the only hatred expressed in her autobiographical tale is imaginary – she assumed that everyone would hate her.

Over the years, each time I told the truth to someone in our community -- at a PTA meeting, a Little League game -- I was surprised. Each incidence of acceptance chipped away at my fear.

So you were prejudging others, weren't you?

The coastal counties and large cities voted with us, the Central Valley and mountain towns against.

That's an interesting way of putting it. If we are "against" you because we defend marriage, then you are needlessly marginalizing yourself. You are the one making this about you - as such, it is your fault, not mine, if you take it as personal rejection.

In an ironic twist, the opponents of same-sex marriage now claim to be afraid. Witnesses have been withdrawn and the trial isn't being broadcast, in part to protect Proposition 8 backers who are supposedly at risk of "harassment, economic reprisal, threat and even physical violence," in the words of one their lawyers.

Do you know that this is based on actual events since the amendment was adopted?

I have laughed at the absurdities of some of the arguments.

So have I.

Young people raised in a society with fearless, out-of-the-closet teachers, elected officials and celebrities don't see the point of defining marriage as only between a man and a woman; they have more important things to worry about.

You, apparently, don't have "more important" things to worry about, though. Thankfully, we don't base public policies on the naïve and inexperienced whims of ninth graders, who have never been married or had children (well, some of them have, but they haven't raised any) and have been fed a steady diet of propaganda. A lot of them will come to see the value in marriage and providing a child with both a mother and a father.

Interestingly, she has a memoir being released later this year. Here's what this website says about it.

In her memoir, Katherine A. Briccetti writes about three generations of missing fathers: her father's closed adoption in the 1930s, her own adoption by her stepfather in the 1960s, and finally, the "second-parent" adoption of her sons by her partner in the 1990s.

Fascinated from an early age by the holes in her family tree, Briccetti takes it upon herself to search for her father's birth parents. As her search begins to reveal more tantalizing clues about the family she never knew, she is forced to confront her own tenuous relationship with her two fathers-the father who gave her up as a little girl and the stepfather she struggles to connect with in her adult years.

Draw your own conclusions.