Jeff Kent, who played second base for the Los Angeles Dodgers this season, has stepped into the emotional world of same-sex marriage, giving $15,000 to backers of the California proposition on Tuesday's ballot that would ban it.
In a disclosure filed with the California secretary of state, Kent listed his occupation as professional baseball player for the Dodgers and his address as Austin, Texas. He gave the $15,000 in a transaction dated Monday but which only now is public.
Proposition 8 would ban same-sex marriage by imposing a California constitutional amendment that would define marriage as being between one man and one woman.
With both sides spending upward of $30 million each, the measure has become the most costly ballot measure ever dealing with a social issue, and the spending is by far the most for any proposition anywhere in the country this year.
Kent, a free agent who is considering retiring, is a potential Hall of Famer who is best known for his years with the San Francisco Giants. A Bellflower native, Kent also played baseball at University of California, Berkeley.
A review of campaign records shows no other donations to federal or California state campaigns by Kent.
Frank Schubert, managing the Yes-on-8 campaign, said he was unaware that Kent had weighed in.
"He has had a stellar career and will no doubt one day be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame," Schubert said. "I wish the Giants had kept Kent and traded [Barry] Bonds."
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2 comments:
YOOGE!
Jeff Kent would donate to this, something so bigoted that it staggers and prods at my sense of good and evil, they used to ban interracial marriage too, and the same bigoted people wailed when those walls were coming down. He has, according to the records, never felt compelled to donate money before this. This makes my eyeballs bleed.
To deny people the right to call themselves married, with its implications of socially legitimized love, of socially recognized love and of blessed love is to say that some love is better than other love not based on the expression of that love, but simply on who expresses that love. The idea that this is ok, to call someone's love inferior because of who they are is so disgusting and should be the worst part of our past that we have abandoned as so much snake skin, that this power to judge the legitimacy of the love of others, for no matter what these advocates of denying homosexuals the right to marriage say, this is what it is about, is the hallmark of a culture that still doesn't understand what a lynching is. But that lynches and hates and fears because that gives them the right to have an other to bestow the comfort of hate upon - that we still can't see that, after the "working class" Hillary's campaign and after the "IRS as a welfare agency" campaign of Palin and McCain over the last couple months in their attempts to bring down the campaign of Obama, who has run a fundamentally decent campaign based more largely on issues than most campaigns, is to realize just how deep hatred goes is defining the world for so many people. And they call it love. And the protection of love. Nothing could be more foul. They caress hate and call it the defense of a society. It is that alright. It is a remnant of the society of Mississippi in the 1920s and 1930s, of the stones thrown at buses in the Boston of the 1970s or at the King marchers in Chicago in the 1960s. It is the culture embodied, ultimately, in the crucifixion of Matthew Shepherd on an empty Wyoming road, his tears frozen on his dying face when they found him like a scarecrow tied to a fence.
If they would devote their energies to limiting domestic violence, which makes marriage a prison, if they would devote their efforts to helping struggling couples with kids insure that the children would receive brilliant early education so that it would be one less thing to worry about, if they would put their efforts into finding ways to help couples struggling financially (for divorce's #1 reason for occurrence they tell us over and over is "finances") get through a hard time, then maybe they wouldn't see a need to limit what is the liberty to love in ways that are publicly legitimized and celebrated, because they would be loving and they would be acknowledging what we already know, if we stop and think about it, that we depend on everybody else not to burn our house down, and that it has never been for us to throw rocks at people who are, just after all, walking down the street.
I'm so sick of this. I'm so sick of people looking for houses to burn down when there are so many things we have to do. I can barely read the stories on Prop 8 because I hate the idea so much, that so many people feel free to judge love.
And that they so often use as a shield a religion that in its original words was about the necessity of love without condition. I just want to get this off my chest.
I can't say I've ever had the warm fuzzies for Jeff Kent, but his ignorance testifies to a life that despite every freedom which wealth can bestow, is still limited by the poverty that hate ultimately bestows on the victims it lives within. The world is beautiful. Love is beautiful. That doesn't change when two men kiss or two women kiss. Or when they have each other, which after all is simply a testament that at the end of the day what we want most is not to isolate others, to mark them as separate, but to connect and to love. It is so odd to attack love. It is so odd to think that love is a threat or to think it has an agenda other than to love. It is so selfish, like a worrisome four year old with a toy he will not sure, to say that such a thing as marriage and thus the full rights of love as we have come to see it, might belong to one and not to another.
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