{"id":378,"date":"2008-06-12T21:22:46","date_gmt":"2008-06-13T01:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/judykat.com\/ken\/2008\/06\/12\/empathy\/"},"modified":"2008-06-12T23:47:20","modified_gmt":"2008-06-13T03:47:20","slug":"empathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/empathy\/","title":{"rendered":"Empathy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jezebel has a post<\/a> about a Massachusetts politician who defended gay marriage in his state.<\/p>\n

He didn’t know his daughter was gay at the time.<\/p>\n

“Because, of course, he didn’t know that I was gay then,” the 18-year-old recalls. “So, for someone so publicly to fight for something that doesn’t even affect him was just like, ‘That’s my dad,’ you know?” she says with a laugh. “That’s all I could think. I was very, very proud to be part of this family, and this state in general.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now she’s come out and the two remain close. <\/p>\n

A politician acted as if someone he loved was affected by a piece of legislation before knowing someone he loved was affected by that legislation.<\/p>\n

Refreshing. <\/p>\n

You hear about politicians coming to support a policy because they or their family become directly involved: insurance reform, funding for medical research, gun control, and gay rights to name a few.<\/p>\n

In a representative democracy, shouldn’t a politician’s singular gift be the ability to empathize with people affected by their policy agendas? People who are not like them? People who are not literally related to them?<\/p>\n

If direct experience changes one position, shouldn’t a politician take that to heart and examine if any of their other views suffer from a similar lack of imagination?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jezebel has a post about a Massachusetts politician who defended gay marriage in his state. He didn’t know his daughter was gay at the time. “Because, of course, he didn’t know that I was gay then,” the 18-year-old recalls. “So, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[58,57,541,542,540],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-conscience","tag-empathy","tag-insurance-reform","tag-massachusetts","tag-politician"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}