It seems to me Republicans spend more time thinking about gay sex than any other group of people in the known world even more so than gay people trying to find other gay people with whom to have sex.
Of course, I'm talking about our very own esteemed state representative Gloria Vaughn. In case you missed the latest, Vaughn has proposed we amend the New Mexico State Constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
Now I could criticize this move from so many angles that frankly my mind fizzles and goes blank, making it hard to choose from which direction to attack.
Nevertheless, I'll give it my best.
How about: It's is a colossal waste of time.
Evidently, every New Mexican makes a decent living wage. No child will go to bed tonight with an empty stomach, because they are all well fed. For that matter, no child will go to bed with an empty mind because our education system is tops in the world.
Evidently our streets are free of drugs. Every New Mexican has a job and can feed their families with a $5.15 minimum wage. Our roads are the best in the nation. Everyone in the state has access to affordable health care.
We can only assume such is the case, because Vaughn isn't seeking to amend the Constitution to solve any of those problems. No. The most important item on her agenda is to make sure that gay people can't marry one another in the state of New Mexico.
...So please Mrs. Vaughn, and any other Republican who supports this, let's work on some issues that might actually improve the lives of New Mexicans. After all, time is short. There's only 60 days in the session and while you all were arguing about legislative initiatives to ban gay marriage last year, you failed to pass any laws to improve the minimum wage.
In other words, some poor mom will cry herself to sleep tonight because her kids went to bed hungry. She's trying to figure out how to make ends meet on $5.15 an hour . She doesn't give a tinker's damn about who's sleeping with who. Responses like the above are what I hope will appear in NC newspaper editorials and op-eds if the proposed marriage bill actually makes it out of committee (see my earlier post, At the NC Democratic Party Bloggers Conference, for possible awful developments in this area).
You've got the shaming tactic above, as well as the fairness argument, the civil rights doled out/taken away by the public argument, the faux Christian vs. inclusive Christian perspective, poison pill bills that point out the hypocrisy (banning divorce, limiting marriage to couples capable of procreating), etc.
The whole arsenal has to come out when fighting an amendment, as many equality groups have seen, and sometimes you still don't win if the bill gets to the ballot box.
The reality is that the defeat of a marriage amendment in Arizona occurred because the issue was framed as harming straight, single seniors who are cohabitating.
Look at the breakdown of the vote in Arizona:
Against the amendment:
* moderates
* college grads
* white men
* white women
* voters earning over $50K
* younger voters
* city dwellers
Split:
* Hispanics
For the amendment:
* majority of blacks
* seniors
* conservative Republicans
* folks in the stix
The appeal to people's sense of fairness to the state's gay citizens was purposely avoided -- sad but true. It also probably helped that the state is more libertarian in nature.
I can see similar splits here in NC, but the numbers of folks in the "For the amendment" bloc will certainly outnumber the others. A News & Observer poll in 2005 found that 61 percent of North Carolina voters would vote for an amendment.
The horror of an amendment being placed on the ballot is two-fold -- 1) civil rights should never be determined at the polls and 2) to add insult to injury, since so few people actually vote, you could have a small slice of an entire state's population determining the civil rights of 100% of a state's gay population. That's tragic.
Blender Callie noted this is what happened in her state of Tennessee -- last November a quarter of that state's voters approved an amendment by a landslide -- 80% to 20%. |
