Avoidance Avoidance

Procrastination

It is really pretty simple avoidance is the process of staying away from something or someone.  Not answering the doorbell ringing or not answering the telephone or not answering a question is an example of this process.

However, avoidance avoidance is a psychological conflict inside a person’s mind that results when having to choose between two undesirable alternatives which is the case here.  Let me explain.

Every Sunday, my blog partner and I would deliberate how we would cast off the week with a choice of articles that we would want to post Monday or today.  Since his passing, that process has fallen solely on my shoulders.

As I began to analyze my own speculation of this task, I came to the startling revelation that neither of my short list ideas, were ones that I was terribly excited about; hence, my avoidance avoidance delimma.

While the horrific shootings in Connecticut have been on everyone’s mind for the last several days (and rightly so), I felt that my personal opinion as to how the media was covering the event would be misleading to the actual truths surrounding the killings; plus, perhaps the public has soaked up enough or perhaps better journalism would prevail elsewhere. 

At any event, that left me with my other final choice that I was not particularly desiring to write about but knew that I had to since I knew that the topic was about ready to explode…

So, here we go…

As reported by the Associated Press on November 28, 2012:

WARSAW, Poland — Poland's Supreme Court said Wednesday that a same-sex partner can inherit the right to a deceased's rented apartment.

Edie & Thea, married in Canada.

The decision extends a right that so far was granted only to spouses, children, grandchildren or unmarried heterosexual partners of tenants who had died.

The court said that the right applies equally to a cohabiting same-sex partner if he, or she, had been in an "emotional and physical" relationship with the deceased.

It was a response to the case of a gay man, identified only as Adam K., who sued Warsaw city authorities for denying him the right to stay in the city-owned apartment his partner had rented. The suit was rejected by the lowest court and the man appealed. The court considering the appellation was not sure if the right applied and sought the interpretation from the Supreme Court, which pointed to the Constitution which guarantees equal rights to all.

In denying the apartment to the man, Warsaw authorities argued that it understood relationships to be between heterosexual couples.

Poland, which joined the European Union in 2004 does not allow gay marriage, but Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and some other officials before him, have said that inheritance or social security could be secured to same-sex partners through lawfully registered agreements between them.

What is interesting here is that our own US Supreme Court agreed to take its first serious look at the issue of gay marriage, granting review of California's ban on same-sex marriage and of a federal law that defines marriage as only the legal union of a man and a woman.

At the very least, the court will look at this question: When states choose to permit the marriages of same-sex couples, can the federal government refuse to recognize their validity? But by also taking up the California case, the court could get to the more fundamental question of whether the states must permit marriages by gay people in the first place.

The California case involves a challenge to Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment approved by 52 percent of voters in 2008. It banned same-sex marriages in the state and went into effect after 18,000 couples were legally married earlier that year.

Our world is changing right before our eyes…  this topic would have never gotten any traction back in the 60’s…  70’s… or 80’s…  but since the 1990’s there has been an openness the likes of which the world has never seen before.