Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, November 7, 2005.

"Without having seen the Sistine Chapel one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving."
--Goethe

We 21st century mortals are all fairly jaded. All it takes is a Friday night trip to a video rental store to confirm this. Go ahead. Stagger around with the other zombies as they go from shelf to shelf. Seen it. Seen it. Seen it. Won't like it. That's stupid. Oooo -- bikini. Can't have it. Seen it. Seen it. And so on. Hundreds upon thousands of titles, and it comes down to a shrug and a sigh and "settling" for something.

And yet, because we have experienced so much through movies, television, Internet, etc., we consider ourselves much more worldly than we actually are. This was me visiting Rome and entering the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. I had seen specials, read books on Michelangelo, poured over National Geographic's, but I was sooooo unprepared for actually being there. And I won't attempt to describe it to you here. There truly is no point. But if you have the chance (before Dick Cheney makes all Americans persona non grata outside our borders -- always a Bush Administration dig!), for goodness sake, go!

I will say this: I was awed and touched and humbled, but mostly I was inspired: Standing in the presence of that art, I was struck that there must be something wonderful within us way beyond our capacity for understanding. And yet in the midst of something so divinely inspired there is a very human comedy taking place. During his work, Michelangelo was constantly bickering with the all sorts of church officials including the Pope. When one of the Pope's assistants criticized Michelangelo for including nude figures, Michelangelo painted the assistant as one of the souls suffering in Hell in the Last Judgment mural. There you go people -- an editorial cartoon right there in the Sistine Chapel! For more about that, check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistine_chapel#The_Last_Judgement

Right. So recently Mike Cox, Michigan's attorney general, has been trying to make a name for himself by "enforcing" the very vague wording of last year's amendment to the Michigan constitution to ban gay marriage. Before the amendment passed, the city of Kalamazoo had been awarding benefits to domestic partners of city workers. Mr. Cox has led the charge to revoking these benefits under the banner of "the constitution says so." Let's not kid ourselves. The constitution is a convenience; it's really about pleasing a constituency that finds gays icky and anything that sniffs of helping people who are gay is tantamount to destroying family values and the sanctity of marriage.

And you know what? It's fine for Mike Cox to feel that way if those are his religious convictions. But he should consider this: if morality is going to be the determinant of who gets health insurance, then I can think of only a handful of people who would actually qualify (and heterosexual me is not one of them).

Here's the kicker: Last week Thursday, after the comic was already in the paper, Mike Cox has a press conference to reveal he has had at least one extramarital affair. My timing was, sadly, more than perfect. At least I was a little nicer than Michelangelo and drew my guy in heaven....