All About Me

"Portman says he changed his mind because he looked at his son and wanted him to have a happy life. But the gay people to whom Portman was denying marriage before his conversion—those people were also someone's sons and daughters. Does Portman only care about suffering when it occurs in his family?"
Rob Portman's Selfish Reversal on Marriage Is a Triumph for Gay Rights

If so, I'd be willing to bet that he's not alone.

I downloaded this from PostSecret some years back. I suspect it's a pretty common "secret" here in the United States.

Normally, I would think that a politician would avoid making so overtly selfish a statement. But maybe he's doing as we expect politicians to do: echoing the sentiments of their constituents. Despite the fact that the United States has long stood for "Liberty and Justice for All," the definition of "All" has rarely been as expansive as most of us presume it to be. In a lot of ways, the most surprising thing about Portman's statement is that he seems unashamed to actually own up to that reality - especially given the amount of time and energy that we commonly put into denying it.

But this is another one of those things that, rather than seeing as being a capital offense in others, that we should simply recognize when it's present in ourselves and move on. There's a reason why "All politics is local," and it's because, for the most part, that all politics is also personal.