The hardiest trout, out of its water, gasps, flops and dies. There is nothing balletic nor graceful about the struggle. Yet perhaps we might all identify with these throes. We are all terminal patients on this common ward.
As I return from my prolonged stay in New York State, I found much that was news, but not new, greeting me.
I was certainly not surprised that our latest in a series of gutless commonwealth attorneys general, Martha Coakley, shoveled along the petition to repeal the repeal of the 1913 law set limiting marriage here to only couples whose home states would not prohibit their unions.
Were this advanced by a professional marriage/family-limiting group like Mass Family Institute (MFI) or Focus on the Family, we could assume cynical self-interest. After all, they live to hang up effigies to rouse the passions and extract funds from the simple minded. Instead, here we find the lone proprietor of Mass Resistance flailing and flopping like that trout, hoping to once again inspire passions.
I can't even dislike such a functionary as Coakley. Like her previous AG, Tom Reilly, she is not a leader, nor a moral person, nor even a judge. Instead, she focuses on the narrowest of questions, such as does this petition request meet the bare minimum hurdle?
Assuming the one or two or three MR folk gather the 33,000-plus valid voter signatures (likely 40,000 or more to ensure enough valid ones), this measure would go to vote no early than 2010. Frankly, no one really cares and it is sure to lose. Yet in the name of special interest manipulated democracy, it may even advance to defeat. Will the trout then finally expire or keep flopping in panic on the public dock?
Like a single drop in the communal well, we all drink from the bucket of equality now
His old MFI buddies, led by Skeletor-looking Kris Mineau, has shunned, shunned this quixotic signature drive. MFI's site reveals much of the status of these groups that would redefine marriage in some archaic, fantasized form. All these anti-gay groups abusing the pro-family and pro-marriage terms when they mean the opposite are fellow fish gasping their last out-of-water breaths.Over at Mineau's site, we read:
Massachusetts Family Institute is not participating in the referendum effort to reinstate the so-called 1913 Law because there is no winning on this issue. By the time the measure reaches the ballot in 2010, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of out-of-state same-sex couples already will have married in Massachusetts. More importantly, even if the referendum effort were successful at the ballot in 2010, this Governor and legislature--bent on exporting the same-sex marriage experiment--could easily pass another repeal in 2011.The abrasive realities include such as Massachusetts is now the dwarf on the basketball team. California, with no restrictions on out-of-state couples marrying, is the real team. The prattle about us exporting hordes of wedding lesbians and gay men to spread their loving homosexual disease is laughable. First, Massachusetts-wedded couples have not scattered like marriage revolutionaries in four years. Second, there is no preventing those married here or in Canada or Spain or elsewhere to travel and settle, if they choose. Like a single drop in the communal well, we all drink from the bucket of equality now.
Those of compassion and reason are right to pity and feel for those who hate. Yet we can also feel glad that their desperate days are few.
There are many nasty tricks they can and will try here and elsewhere. They place a heavy onus on MassEquality, Equality for All and others to defend against each new effort to strip their fellow citizens of rights. With New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and other states preparing to offer pro-family and pro-marriage equality in the form of same-sex marriage, we have to fight these fights, fund the heroes, and hear the same tripe again and again.
After driving back Proposition 8 in California and adding more states to the equality list, we still face the long roster of those with DOMA-style laws and amendments. I could weep at the social retardation of our nation. There are better ways to spend our time, effort and money.
Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, amendment, Camenker, MassResistance, marriage equality, 1913
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