Between The Shadow and the Soul

also, this

this absolutely made me feel better about life

Awesome site

“It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity.”

—Eleanor Roosevelt

Opponents, including the lawyers for California’s 2008 ban on gay marriage, Proposition 8, contend that allowing gays and lesbians to marry redefines marriage. But Olson and Boies argue that by rooting the meaning of marriage so firmly in procreation it’s in fact their opponents who are doing the redefining: they who have proposed “a cramped definition of marriage as a utilitarian incentive devised by and put into service by the state—society’s way of channeling heterosexual potential parents into ‘responsible procreation.’ ”

While serving as governor of Utah, I pushed for civil unions and expanded reciprocal benefits for gay citizens. I did so not because of political pressure—indeed, at the time 70 percent of Utahns were opposed—but because as governor my role was to work for everybody, even those who didn’t have access to a powerful lobby. Civil unions, I believed, were a practical step that would bring all citizens more fully into the fabric of a state they already were—and always had been—a part of. That was four years ago. Today we have an opportunity to do more: conservatives should start to lead again and push their states to join the nine others that allow all their citizens to marry.

The sane one of the lot.

Then, in 2009, a Duke University professor demonstrated that our eyes can scan an image fastest when its shape is a golden rectangle. For instance, it’s the ideal layout of a paragraph of text, the one most conducive to reading and retention. This simple shape speeds up our ability to perceive the world, and without realizing it, we employ it wherever we can.