Dear Karen Johnson

I have purposely avoided writing this letter to you because my disgust for what you have done in your final days as an Arizona State legislator is so intense that strong enough words to describe the legacy you will leave escape me. But I simply cannot ignore the seething rage that is eating away at my insides anymore. I must speak up for all the Arizona mothers and fathers whose hearts you drove a stake through with your vote to put Prop 102 on the ballot.

HOW COULD YOU? No really, you of all people, how could you? With your vote to put that hateful Proposition on the Arizona ballot and your strong voice to "Protect the Sanctity of Marriage", you successfully managed to herd thousands of your fellow Arizonans to the back of the bus. With your vote to put Proposition 102 on the Arizona ballot, you insultingly told mothers and fathers like me and my husband of 27 years that you were going to protect the sanctity of our marriage by making sure that one of our beloved children would be forever a second-class citizen. And with your vote to put Proposition 102 on the Arizona Ballot you told fair-minded Arizonans what your vote was really about: hate.

With FIVE marriages under your own self-righteous belt, you really should have abstained Karen. With FIVE marriages under your own belt, you really should have hidden with shame or not shown up to cast one of the deciding yes votes that put this atrocity on the ballot. And with FIVE marriages under your belt, you should have been the first to stand up and say that it is not two people of the same sex who want commit to each other that threaten marriage, but divorce, alcoholism, spousal abuse, joblessness, drug abuse, etc. Your voice would have mattered Karen, because you could have spoken from the heart and with some experience.

But no Karen, you didn't have the courage to do that. It was far easier to blame the disastrous state of the insitution of marriage on an easy target, my son and thousands of other gays and lesbians who had nothing to do with your FIVE failed marriages. And what an easy target they were for you. Your disdain and disgust for gays and lesbians made it way too easy to blame them for what ails the institution of marriage, didn't it Karen?

Well you should have, at the very least, abstained from that vote Karen Johnson. It would have been the honorable thing for you to do since you obviously didn't have the courage to do the right thing and vote NO to blaming innocent people for your own failures. But instead Karen you decided to cast a vote that really said more about you than it said about your concern for the sanctity of marriage.

Well, Karen Johnson, I am one Arizonan who will not be sorry to see you go. And I will never ever forgive you for using your power as a legislator to reach into the sanctity of my family and my marriage and leave the taint of your hate and homophobia.

But remember this Karen, you may have forever enshrined my son's second-class citizenship into the Arizona Constitution, but you forever enshrined your legacy as a cowardly, hateful hypocrite and homophobe. And that is something I hope you can live with.