Do the right thing, then kindly get out of the way

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 22, 2001

When people explain away a terrible event by saying it was God's will, I go straight into teeth-clenched, shout-stopped mode.

God's will, my something-or-other-that's-unprintable.

That would make Nester DeJesus, the bank robber who shot Tampa police Officer Lois Marrero, an agent of the Lord.

People who talk about God's will have their reasons.

They're grasping. Blinded by hurt. Desperate to explain the astoundingly unfair.

There's another method, tried and true. You crawl like a miner down the darkest shaft, searching for the tiniest bit of good in the worst news. It can be a single sliver, but the discovery can keep you sane.

So it may be in the murder of Lois Marrero.

She was a cop. If you called 911 and she answered the call, you didn't see a gay cop. If you were scared enough, you probably didn't even notice she was a woman. All you saw was a cop.

Nothing more or less -- certainly not talk about endorsing the concept of gay marriage -- should be attached to whether the woman who loved her, Tampa Detective Mickie Mashburn, gets Marrero's pension. Not just the $50,000 that Marrero kicked in, but the $66,500 or so of taxpayers' money that the city of Tampa added.

Should, of course, is one of the muckiest words in the language.

Everything sticks to it.

As I write this, gay rights groups are lining up on the left. Religious groups and various associations of people who think, poor creatures, that they have a lock on what constitutes proper moral conduct, are lining up on the right.

The cameras and microphones are setting up. The fax machines are being checked to make sure they properly send and receive. E-mail addresses and phone numbers are being verified in advance of the coming campaign in which a cop who died in the line of duty and the cop who loved her will be seen either as heroines in a fight for equal rights or emblems of the nation's continuing slide into the slime of some hellish nevermore.

I would like to be wrong on this one, but it is hard not to see even the delivery of that $25,000 check from the state's crime victims' compensation fund by that most political operator, Attorney General Bob Butterworth, as a calculated act.

If any good were to come out of the murder of the woman she loved, it would be this:

We would learn that when cops pull their shifts, they are cops.

Not gay cops.

We would learn that the same holds true for butchers, bakers, candlestick makers and every other person -- the clergy, even -- who collects a paycheck and who is gay.

The people who get on TV screaming for and against this would be ignored.

A truce would be declared on at least this front of the national cultural wars.

We would have one less public subject in which we knew all the punch lines of all the arguments on all sides so well that we stopped watching TV when stories about the subject appeared.

The next time somebody tried to introduce a bill in the Legislature declaring that the great institution of marriage was under siege because gay people wanted to marry, he would be laughed out the door and into the lobbyists' laps.

Marriage by so-called normal people is under siege because so-called normal people are too childish or too cruel to know how to get along.

Mickie Mashburn has so far shown no interest in becoming a political buzzword, a talking head, a card to be played by some stranger with an agenda.

Detective Mashburn deserves those pension benefits.

And then -- I include people in my line -- she deserves to be left alone.

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