A recent Weekly cover boy is among those being thanked today for Minnesota voters rejecting a referendum Tuesday that would have stipulated marriage in the Mary Richards State can only be between one man and one woman.
He is, of course, Chris Kluwe, the Vikings punter via UCLA and Los Alamitos High School, whose hilariously caustic letter to a Maryland marriage inequalitist and tireless work for the human rights cause is being credited with possibly leading to Minnesota legalizing same-sex unions in the not-too-distant future.
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See also:
Chris Kluwe's Game Changer: The Los Al High grad and Minnesota Vikings punter is prying open America's last closet: major-league sports
Your Chris Kluwe OC Weekly Cover Story Extra Credit Reading Assignment
The Year In College Football: USC's Stars vs. UCLA's Bars
Reporters gathered around Kluwe's locker Wednesday and, as he soon discovered, they were not there for his thoughts on the Vikings' upcoming game against Detroit. The intelligent and outspoken athlete didn't sound ready to take all the credit for the historic marriage equality victory, however.
“Ultimately, it's more a testament to the people of Minnesota that
this was the right thing to do,” he said (as reported by Minneapolis Star-Tribune “The Dish” columnist C.J.) “If I did help out, I'm glad I was able
to make a difference.”
Kluwe is being heralded for not only helping out in Minnesota but in Maine, Maryland and Washington, which became the first states in the nation where voters approved gay marriage. That's the kind of pioneering social change that could earn Kluwe his own statue some day. Check that: as C.J. reveals in her piece, the punter is already immortalized in a glass sculpture on view through today at the Minneapolis Convention Center.
The column does not disclose if there will be a home for the piece after today, but if we had a vote we'd choose the place Kluwe concedes he'd rather be instead of answering political questions: his Mercenary Market in Costa Mesa.
“I'd rather run my gaming
and miniatures hobby store,” he reportedly tells C.J. “Seems to me a much better use of time.”
Nicely punted.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.