Ken Byron My Amendment Summary

My Amendment begins as a simple letter from a reader named Ken Byron to a writer of a Pennsylvania newspaper discussing his agreement with the writer about their disdain for Same-Sex Marriage and his desire that it be banned in the Constitution. Byron’s argument quickly goes from an expression of his own opinion to an absurd idea of banning Samish-Sex Marriage between an effeminate man and masculine woman. Byron has such strong beliefs that Samish-Sex Marriage should not take place that he has created a scale defining what constitutes a Samish-Sex Marriage and what he believes can be done to ensure no one is entering into Samish-Sex Marriages. George Saunders’ story My Amendment offers a critique of a repugnant social practice through the use

Also, my opinions were unfirm. I was constantly contradicting myself in that fast voice, while gesturing like a girl”. He had long blonde layered hair and had a constant feeling of being happy to be alive, so much so that he would skip at times. (68-69) After he changes his entire personality to fit the Manly Scale of Absolute Gender, Byron says, “Now, if you ever meet me, you will observe that I always speak in an extremely slow and manly and almost painfully deliberate way, with my hands either driven deep into my pockets or held stock-still at the end of my arms… as if I were ready to respond to the slightest provocation by punching you in the face”.

Throughout his letter he makes a mockery of the fact that people have the right to love whomever they please. His own ideas of social norms and what he feels a man and woman should look like on the outside are the basis for his scale and definition of Samish-Sex Marriage. There is no science or evidence behind his ideas, they are based completely on his own opinions and beliefs. He has the audacity to infer that people like, “K,” “S,” “L,” “H,” “T,” and “O” “asserting their rights” by dating, falling in love with, marrying and spending the rest of their lives with whomever they please” (71) is a bad thing and should not be allowed.
He goes even further to trample on the basic rights of humans when he says that it is ridiculous that their nation should be ruled by the anarchy of unconstrained desire and that people should be concerned about the external form in which that desired thing is embodied. (Page 71) Byron feels that it is imperative for each man and woman in a relationship or marriage to conform to his idea of the social and gender norms regardless of whether this interferes with their right to make their own decisions about their appearance and whom they