Live Free (Straight-Only) NH

What's amazing about the current generation of Republican legislators is how they disdain republican government and have no trouble subverting American principles. Take New Hampshire. Do take it and don't bring it back until it understands.

In the worst recent example, Tuesday, New Hampshire's GOP dominated House Judiciary Committee in the GOP dominated House advanced a bill to repeal the state's same-sex marriage law. That would be the law that involved myriad public hearings and polling, a wrenching open statewide conversation about how sincere they were about equal rights and that live-free-or-die thing, and close votes in both houses. It passed two years ago and took effect last year.

Over 1700 homosexual couples are married there — to their advantage and to the harm of absolutely no one.

Key ideas for governance around this country include that republicanism. The supreme power of states and nation are supposed to reside in the people, who in turn choose their representatives to do the work of running the show. That has a counterbalance of courts to correct the occasional craziness and unconstitutionality, and roughly half the states have the flamethrower of populism, ballot initiatives or referenda. By the bye, NH has neither of those popular-vote traps.

After Tuesday's rejection of equality and liberty, the key guides to the state and nation, the crooked path lies ahead. The bill goes to the House for consideration. The Senate will duplicate the committee discussion and if it advances the bill, debate it as well.

As unbelievably un-American as it is, this process is advancing in the GOP majority legislature in Concord. The Republicans may well be willing to create unequal classes of citizens where there was one. They would regress to stripping existing rights from homosexuals, including writing in law permission to discriminate in housing and employment and otherwise by producing a lesser civil-union class than existed before marriage equality passed.

This seemingly vindictive anti-gay process would make a third class of adult citizen. Heterosexuals, who marry or not, can or do reproduce or not, divorce or not, are in one group. The married homosexual couples are in another, and so far at least, won't lose their status and many benefits of the married are in another. Then under the new version, the lesser civil unions have only the privileges that employers and others might graciously grant them...at least temporarily. Un-American? No bet!

Note the lunacy and illogic in the bills preamble, including:

The vast majority of children are conceived by acts of passion between men and women – sometimes unintentionally. Because of this biological reality, New Hampshire has a unique, distinct, and compelling interest in promoting stable and committed marital unions between opposite-sex couples so as to increase the likelihood that children will be born to and raised by both of their natural parents. No other domestic relationship presents the same level of state interest.

Straight couples who don't have kids or adopt or can give birth or some other very common circumstance are not punished. That's reserved for homosexuals. Let's not even get into the awful situations many two-parent families visit on their kids in terms of alcoholism, other drug problems, and abuse physical, sexual and psychological. Nice job, GOP law crafters.


It's all too cruel and stupid. Taking away existing rights from an entire class of people is a disgrace. It also turns NH's motto backward. They'll need a new one, one that says nothing about freedom.