Mass. Gambit Out West

With the budget as tight as it is here, Massachusetts should charge wingers a licensing fee. We are yet again being used as an advertising ploy, a weapon.

This time, it is the other Lexington couple devastated that they and their children would have to face simple, gentle reality here — that same-sex marriage is legal. Following the publicity hound Parkers, the much calmer but still reactionary Wirthlins (see clip below) are tools in the campaign to stop SSM in California.

Massachusetts remains the hammer in the anti-gay wingers' tool kit. First for SSM and then requiring diversity and fairness in education, we are the control freaks' horror. The yes-on-8 folk use the tag line with the Wirthlins of Protect your children. Protect marriage.

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No one on the anti-SSM side can even begin to explain how expanding marriage (redefining it as they would have it) harms their marriages in the slightest. Court after court at local, state and federal levels agree that there's no damage to sue for there. Protect marriage is a throwaway, just a rallying cry.

The first slogan goes to the heart of the specious ad campaign. The protection they seek is really from the larger world, with the legality of SSM being just a tiny snippet of reality.

Let's get down to it here. These parental rights types want to abrogate their primary responsibility to their kids, to give them a framework for the world outside their homes.

Having attended trials on these suits and read briefs and other related documents, I kept running across the punchline. These couples and a small group of similar ones say that they have the right to be the primary moral instructors of their kids. Indeed they do and it is a duty as well as a right.

They then fail in two ways:

1. By claiming that even mentioning the legality of SSM or the existence of homosexual-couple led families, the schools have usurped that parental right.
2. By not taking reality in stride at the light level the schools mention it, they have tried to avoid teaching their kids, being the moral instructors.

In my life, I have been instructed by my family both by example and by word. I also got moral views from church, Boy Scouts, my team coaches and others. Not a single one of them said, "I'm the only source of information or opinion you need or should have."

Instead, the assumption was that I had the wit and heart to digest what I saw, what I experienced, what I read and what I heard. In contrast, the Lexington couples have an extremely unrealistic expectation that they can put their kids in idea bubbles.

Moreover, they choose to avoid their role as moral teachers. I have raised three kids, I can show them how to deal with children's question and confusion. I considered that my duty.

If their kids come home with questions about a picture book that has a king marrying another king, fury and a sense of violation are not the rational response. Instead, for anti-SSM, anti-gay parents, the simple and effective answer for a second grader is something like, "In this state, two men can legally marry. We don't agree with that and believe that it goes against the Bible's teachings."

How hard is that? Isn't that part of being the primary moral instructor? Won't that help a child frame outside facts and information?

Yet, in California, the fearsome hammer of Massachusetts SSM and the dreaded possibility of having to speak with your kids become the tool of choice today. Of course, this is disingenuous. Of course, it's dishonest. It remains to be seen whether it will scare or convince anyone not already in the yes-on-8 camp.

By the bye, the good guys, the ones who want to expand marriage, are trying to put the truth to such lies. They could use our financial help right now.

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Tags: massmarrier, California, same sex marriage, ballot initiative, Proposition 8