Disconnected SSM Panic Button

Nationwide and beyond, left, center and even a few rightist newspaper editorials rip George Bush on his anti-SSM amendment push. After its predictable defeat in the U.S. Congress, we all wonder whether evangelicals and other easily manipulated voters will buy it this time.

Slate's editor, Jacob Weisberg, has three reasons in his analysis that it will fail.

Meanwhile the editorials and news analyses are filled with pandering and desperation and similar terms to describe this election-year ploy. Conservative entertainers like Coulter and Limbaugh, as well as columnists, have fallen to Pee Wee Herman-type retorts -- I know you are. What am I, and You're a bigot if you call me a bigot!

Consider Weisberg's main points:

1. The "combination of cynicism and futility evident in the way Republicans aer bringing the matter up now." No states beyond Massachusetts have legalized SSM. The DOMA is still in place. There are now laws and/or amendments prohibiting SSM in 45 states. Also, the evangelicals, who sat up and barked on command in 2004, only to find George the Lesser forgetting the SSM issue until now, "are in effect being told: Come and get your election--year bone, before we kick you back into your doghouse on Nov. 8."
2. Democrats, who can let righteousness get in the way of pragmatism, have learned how to handle SSM. They point to the states-rights angle, to the amendment banning civil unions as well as SSM, and the danger of goofing with the Constitution, particularly with DOMA in effect.
3. Also, this battle has been lost, here and elsewhere, First World nations have slowly and quietly grown to accept homosexuals and even SSM. Gay-rights legislation abounds and the younger generations yawn while WWII and Boomer grayheads rant like the Pope or Sam Brownback.
   

Weisberg doesn't touch on what many editorial writers and bloggers do -- our nation is staggering and reeling under borrow-and-spend Republican debt, thousands of our war dead, an ever increasing security peril as the War on Terrorism fails, and an executive branch that lies, spies on us all, and tries to destroy the balance of power in our government.

We were astonished that this nation would end up with George the Lesser -- twice. Surely all but the most dull-witted minority can now see this small group repeatedly pushing this SSM panic button for what it is.

Yet, we have mid-term elections pending that will show whether we choose the fantasy world again or deal with the problems that doing that twice has brought us.

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Tags: massmarrier, Congress, same sex marriage, George Bush, amendment