It has started out as a blustery day in Pensacola, fairly possibly making today’s Blue Angels season-ending finale trickier than usual, and it would have been tricky decent with the lost No. 4 slot plane pilot grounded for “an inappropriate relationship” with a female colleague.

Sex guilt. One gift of the Puritans we can’t be thankful for.

Meanwhile, in downtown Pensacola “Join the Impact” will hold a rally today just after midday. They’re protesting the new amendment to the Florida state structure approved by voters on election day. An absolutely superfluous amendment. An amendment that, at its best, virtually repeats existing state law. An amendment, in short, whose sole purpose is to rub salt in open wounds and glorify the torturers.

As for the rally, it’s part of the national coordinated “Join the Impact” protest against local and state laws that discriminate against same-sex couples who want to get married and, for that matter, opposite-sex couples who don’t.

Sex guilt, again.

To be fair there’s better reason to discipline heterosexual members of

the Blue Angels team who violate anti-fraternization rules than there is to punish ordinary citizens who just want a little happiness in that life in the privacy of their home. The planes fly within inches of each other by hundreds of thousands of onlookers; one supposes the Blue Angels don’t want pilots getting too emotional when they see a rival for love sidling up to them at 700 mph.

But what reason could there possibly be for Florida voters to have approved Amendment No. 2 or California voters Proposition 8? None but the Puritan legacy of fear, bigotry and the age-old impulse to punish others considering it is so self-affirming. As Leonard Pitts writes, intolerance is a “seductive thing.”

[I]t can be to resist the serpent whisper that says it’s OK to ridicule and marginalize those folks by there considering they look funny, or talk funny, worship funny or love funny.

Intolerance makes a undoubtful kind of human feel better. Never more so than when he or she suffers from sex guilt.

Original post by Beach Blogger