Making sense of it all

Carol Anne Burger slew Jessica Kalish by stabbing her 222 times with a Philips-head screwdriver. The moral of the story?

After the sad incident, some observers suggested that the story of Jess and Carol highlighted the need for across-the-board legal recognition of civil unions and same-sex marriages.

Wow. Now that's what I call a stretch.

And in case it isn't clear: the suggested problem here isn't that Ms. Burger was driven to commit this definitively evil act because of the lifetime of discrimination she'd suffered as a lesbian. This wasn't a desperate and perverse concession to, and consummation of, the 'abnormality' legally imposed upon her by society. For she and Ms. Kalish were married! In Massachusetts in 2005! Rather, the problem is that the state of Florida wouldn't legally recognize their divorce.

"It's very messy for us to get disentangled," says Elizabeth F. Schwartz, a Miami-based family attorney specializing in same-sex issues. "This is one example of many of a couple that entered into a marriage and then couldn't get themselves out of it. When the kind people of Massachusetts grant you the right to marry but Florida won't recognize those marriages, it can make getting a divorce very difficult. Certainly the answer is not to kill your ex, but it does remind us that the consequences can be grave when we don't have a legal and appropriate way out."

Hmmmnn ... Let's see here: 222 stab wounds to the upper body less 1 state recognition of a same-sex couple's right to end their marriage ...

Nope! Still doesn't balance.

But while we're on this tack: I wonder what "some observers" might have had to say about this little detail:

[Burger] got dressed, drove a mile in the opposite direction of the BMW [containing Kalish's dead body--ed.], and dropped Jessica's keys and wallet in a rough neighborhood.

Boynton Beach has an awful lot of Hispanic and Haitian residents, I gather. I wonder how many of them live in this "rough neighborhood" just south of Gateway Blvd? Seems like an odd place for a fiercely Democrat, progressive activist, Huffington Post blogger to be planting evidence, don't you think? Of course, it wouldn't be if we recognized that the woman was just a complete nutjob. But seeing as we're playing down that angle.