On a post about lessons learned from the anti-equality amendment battle, Likes Bikes 2 asked some of the same questions I and others have:
Mike,Those are fair questions, no matter who's asking. I suspect quite a few bloggers, as well as rights activists, are rethinking their roles and directions.
I am just now learning to exhale. I feel like I had been holding my breath for so long over this issue.
What does it feel like to not worry about the Kris Mean-o and his friends, lurking in the bushes, saying mean and nasty things about my family?
Thank you. For providing a place of sanity, for your analysis, for your clarity. For your steadfastness to this issue.
Maybe we'll find ourselves on the same bike ride someday, and I'll get to thank you in person.
In the next few days, I'll post a bit on Terminator-style I'll-be-back proclamations of the anti-gay and anti-marriage-equality folk. They too offer lessons learned for us as well as for themselves. Once I got over the feeling that we should just ignore them, I admit that they still bear watching out of the corner of one eye.
The answer for Marry in Massachusetts includes:
- The commonwealth's marriage-equality fight has dominated posting and commenting here because it is where the threats, promises, hopes and action have been.
- The considerable cleanup of marriage-related and ballot-initiative laws is crucial, long overdue and needs some prodding. I've been hitting on many of these in the last couple of years, while many pols have hidden from them, particularly with the ongoing fight over this amendment. Only a handful, notably Rep. Byron Rushing, target bad laws.
- There are other aspects of marrying in Massachusetts that are not contentious but still worthy of commentary. I need to revisit the one-day designated solemnizer for one.
- Also if we can get rid of those dreadful laws forbidding out-of-state same-sex couples from marrying here, I want to perform marriages for some friends from Florida and elsewhere. It's been a couple of years since I solemnized a marriage.
- The progressive political aspects beyond marriage have other outlets, including occasional posting to Blue Mass Group, but regular work with Ryan and Lynne on our Left Ahead! blog with weekly podcast.
- I'll be putting more other stuff -- photography, JP and larger Boston color, and rants -- on Harrumph!.
1 comment:
Keep the tent flaps...flapping! :) I've thoroughly enjoyed your writing and analysis, and came to depend on you site as a touchstone of clarity and logic. I am of course extatic that your blog has lost some of it's reason for being (although there is still TONS of legal clean up to be done, as you mention), but I will go through withdrawal not having it to read every day.
Perhaps you can pick up a hobby in your online dotage. I think someone needs to write "the people's history" of the quest for equal marriage in MA. That is, the story from the point of view of we grunts: the bloggers, the volunteers, the cousin who wrote a once in a lifetime letter to the editor, the people who gave 20 bucks or spoke up in church or came out as the parent of a gay person, or created an organization. You have 3 years of your own narrative right here as a tool to revisit the daily ups and downs of the trevail. How about it? :)
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