Even worse, what if the viability of a candidacy is decided on a single issue, such as same-gender marriage? Imagine, with all of the problems plaguing paradise, if the electability of a politician was determined solely by whether he or she actively opposes equal rights for gays.
For example, what would happen if a state representative, who had the reputation for being an advocate for the poor and disabled, was pitted against an incumbent senator who had a really shady history, including beating his wife and disappearing to Las Vegas during legislative hearings. What if people voted for him, though, just because he is a staunch opponent of recognizing gay relationships? Scary stuff.
Faced with that frightening specter, I did what any thoughtful, stressed-out, overloaded individual would do: I brewed a nice cup of tea and curled up with an entertaining collection of short fiction stories to get my mind off the madness.
Unfortunately, one of the tales in my book, titled "Shudder Again," was Charles Beaumont's "The Crooked Man," written in 1955.
Whoa! Beaumont wrote this piece more than four decades ago - long before all this rigamarole over same-gender marriage in Hawaii's courts. Yet the premise of the tale is compelling, because it occurs in a futuristic society in which the heterosexuals (i.e. straight people, non-homosexuals) are deemed to be deviant.
During one speech by a majority party senator, he thunders the following:
"Vice is on the upswing in our city. In the dark corners of every Unit perversion blossoms like an evil flower. Our children are exposed to its stink, and they wonder - our children wonder - why nothing is done to put a halt to this disgrace.
"We have ignored it long enough! The time has come for action, not mere words. The perverts who infest our land must be flushed out, eliminated completely, as a threat not only to public morals but to society at large.
"These sick people must be cured and made normal. The disease that throws men and women together in this dreadful abnormal relationship and leads to acts of retrogression - retrogression that will, unless it is stopped and stopped fast, push us inevitably back to the status of animals."
REMEMBER when our mothers used to tell us to obey the Golden Rule, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us? Well, that's good advice.
For a moment, let's imagine ourselves in that hypothetical world of the future in which the straight people are considered to be the sick, immoral and evil ones. How would we deal with the shame and stigma? Could we successfully carry the burden of such a loathsome label? How would any of us like to be members of an underclass that didn't enjoy the rights and privileges of the majority?
Luckily for me, I can stop reading "The Crooked Man," put it away and return to a world where I am part of the mainstream. Nobody is persecuting me because of the way I am. Nobody is taking away my rights, like the right to vote. Not yet, anyway.