I'm not much for regurgitating newspaper articles. However, I do point to a double in this morning's Boston Globe. There's a portent of marriage-equality battles to be as well as a warning that some warriors we have wearied of are still in armor.
There's a sidebar with minor updates on MassEquality's future. Its board did as so many of us had predicted and hoped, decided to shift its efforts to helping other states with gay-rights and marriage-equality efforts. The board figures they should leverage their expertise and support. Also, ME will work with Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) on such efforts as repealing Bill Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act. Of course, the big issue there is that the IRS and the rest of the federal government use DOMA as a way of keeping legally married homosexual couples from having full tax and other rights due to other married couples.
The main article focused on GLAD's efforts with rebuttals from Mass Family Institute's Kristian M. Mineau. While it's great that ME will work for equality, it appears that MFI will keep trying to hold people down. This Eeyore of the right wing, Mineau has revivified his sleeping bugbear of same-sex marriage coming to a church near you. EVERYBODY PANIC!
As he put it, "I don't understand what their premise is, that they're not pushing in any other state." That would be terrible because, because, because...no particular reason. SSM and civil-union states were supposed to bring everything from rampant increases in AIDS to children raped by the thousands to a total breakdown in marriage to priests thrown in jail for slandering homosexuals.
Nothing like any of that has happened, but MFI can't let it go. Apparently it's just too good a fund-raising ploy.
The Globe article cites GLAD's areas of assault on DOMA — the right to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery and the right to family leave given to heterosexual married couples. A GLAD spokeswoman said these two "will resonate with the public."
Mini-Disclaimer: My father, a WWII vet with numerous battle decorations, is buried in Arlington and my family has a lifetime pass to visit. I have absolutely no issue with homosexual soldiers who have earned the right to burial there being interred with their spouses.
While I had predicted that Mineau would slither out of the Bay State after he led his team to defeat on the amendment to stop SSM here. I admit that this is unlikely in the short term because of these trends. While his group and its cohorts are rightfully reduced and clearly diminishing, their bugbear is up and scaring the old folk again.
Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, amendment, same sex marriage, DOMA, MFI, MassEquality
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