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lagilmanWASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush and congressional Republicans are aiming the political spotlight this week on efforts to ban gay marriage, with events at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue -- all for a constitutional amendment with scant chance of passage but wide appeal among social conservatives.
''Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society,'' Bush said in his weekly radio address. ''Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.''
The rest of the NYT article is here, if you still have the stomach to read it. Or you can just call your congresscritter and inform him/her that his/her re-election chances rest upon his/her ability to tell the difference between "democratic republic" and "theocracy." Reminders such as that are never a waste of energy -- quote Jefferson if you can.
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Date: 2006-06-05 05:13 pm (UTC)*seethes with fury*
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Date: 2006-06-05 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-05 06:30 pm (UTC)The article even quotes sources as saying "it's for the children," whcih is mockworthy if ever I heard mockworthy. Good for the children is universal health care, quality schools, safe living conditions, and a healthy ecosystem. Having only one caretaker of each gender who has sexual intercourse only to create more children to be so-raised is so far down the list it's not even on the list. IMDO, anyway.
Of course, then we can get into the lovely FBI vs. journalists case being argued as well, if you want to be disgusted at something purely Constitutional......
And I have a book to write. Damn it. Stop waving these red flags at me!
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Date: 2006-06-05 05:14 pm (UTC)Some days it feels hopeless, but some days, I honestly believe... We're gonna win this one.
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Date: 2006-06-05 05:16 pm (UTC)The point is to stand up and be heard. Otherwise, the ones who are willing to scream and shout and stamp their neocon feet, will take it as their right to run roughshod over our beliefs.
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Date: 2006-06-05 05:21 pm (UTC)You're right of course, and I don't think anyone is disputing the notion of being heard - I'm certainly not. But this fight can have two different effects on people - it can empower them, give them hope, show them the community they stand with that is strongly in support of doing the right thing and that we're not all rooting for the establishment of a theocratic empire... or it can exhaust them. It can ruin them.
My comment was inteded as a bit of optimism to supplement this fight, not to dismiss or overshadow it. I would not devalue a cause I have fought over for years so easily.
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Date: 2006-06-05 06:06 pm (UTC)My biggest worry is that his puppetmasters will engineer another 9/11, whip the country into a pitch of panic, and get him appointed for a third term "because nobody else can keep us safe." That's SOP for this brand of tinpot dictator.
Gay marriage is a hysteria point, like creationism and Creeping Terror. All those evil, evil gays are going to corrupt our children and defile our wives (mentally, apparently, since there's nothing physical going on there). Quick! Hide under the bed!
I don't know how many latent homosexuals are out there waxing phobic to the point of Constitutional destruction, but I'd bet money der Fuehrer is one of them.
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Date: 2006-06-05 06:10 pm (UTC)Democracy, my ass.
We agree on everything else.
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Date: 2006-06-05 06:19 pm (UTC)That's why I said "won" the popular vote--there was tweakage. The Supremes appointed him in 2000. In 2004 his cronies fiddled the vote as you indicate, to make it look as if he won.
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Date: 2006-06-05 11:33 pm (UTC)Someone on a mailing list I'm put up a post with the title, "notes from the road" -- after losing his job and being out of work, he got work as a long distance trucker. Reporting in from Boise Idaho, he wrote that the truck truck drivers he's been talking to over the past five weeks "ALL confirm" believe that the occupant of the Oval Office was the cause of 9/11 and ought to be removed from office.
My vicious questions are of the sort, "which Christian mythological demons of hell are infesting the US Executive Branch these days?" since that bunch appears to be heavily into Christian Mythos beliefs, with Revelations and the Rapture and Rev. Dobbs running with an open door (along with Mr Guckert, rememember him, pet "journalist" rightwing attack journalist under whatever pseudonym he was using, until uncovered as whatever the vernacular is for male prostitute for men, running websites fearing paramilitary gay porn... It's amazing how quickly references to him disappeared and got buried, the Executive Branch had had an open door for him into the White House on an at least daily basis...) into the White House.
The Constitution still includes parody/satire as protected speech, on the other hand the Constitution's been abrogated so majorly...stilll...
Meanwhile, it's a giant distraction, to take the media attention off of malfeasance, incompetence, sectarian partisanship (the audience spoken to was full of clerics, but not I expect any from religious groups which perform gay marriages and/or civil unions... Episcopalianism, Reform Judaism, Unitarian Univeralism... are such threats to the national security (sarcasm) after all.... it's not like there were any of them serving (sarcasm again, massively) in the US military at the Battle of the Bulge, in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Korea... but their priest and ministers and rabbis who've presided over gay marriages, I expect were not among the religious official in the audience for "ban gay marriage!"), the devastation of the environment, the war against women controlling their own destiny and having sovereignty over their reproductive status, etc.
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Date: 2006-06-05 07:07 pm (UTC)What really disgusts me is that this is all a ploy to try and strengthen the social conservitive base for the fall elections! Attempts at stronger fully legilated discrimination for POLITICING!!!
Though I guess I should be passed being surprised at this point
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Date: 2006-06-05 07:09 pm (UTC)MoveOn.org is promoting calling your senator to voice your opinion on this issue, btw.
I'm tempted to pick up this: "50 Simple Things You Can Do to Fight the Right"--what few reviews it's gotten were positive.
Keep hoping, keep fighting.
Suri's law...
Date: 2006-06-05 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-05 08:30 pm (UTC)The whole concept of spouting words that are contradictory to the message the words are trying to convey just amuses me.
"This sentence is a lie."
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Date: 2006-06-05 09:00 pm (UTC)Sorry, don't mean to be nasty. But check out every major poll: none of them point to the remotest possibility of such an amendment actually being enacted (remember, it's two-thirds and three-quarters; not a simple majority).
However, the more the Republican Party can get its opponents to scream about gay marriage, the less they'll be screaming about anything truly important (or damaging).
Then, on my other rant: why should the government have anything to do so whatsoever with the definition of marriage? Indeed, shouldn't marriage be merely a religious institutition, unregulated and unendorsed by the government?
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Date: 2006-06-05 09:09 pm (UTC)If you're referring to me, Ian, you really need to pay better attention. I'm against government interference in personal lives, yes. If that makes me a 'screaming liberal' than the definitions have expanded considerably to included most libertarians I know, as well.
Allow me to point out that nowhere did my comment say that I expected it to be passed. What I said was that it is needful, apparently, to remind our politiicans that this is NOT a theocracy, and that one moral judgement does NOT fit all.
Seriously. Stop dressing up like a troll. It's not a good look on you, and you know better.
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Date: 2006-06-05 10:49 pm (UTC)My apologies.
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Date: 2006-06-05 11:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 01:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-05 09:15 pm (UTC)::sigh:: If they want to play the child card, wouldn't the example of a caring relationship between two people (same sex or otherwise) be better for children than being brought up by the state?
-- Katherine
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Date: 2006-06-05 11:50 pm (UTC)They're using derailing strategies, and worse--taking the tracks and moving them, moving the train, moving the train station, and derailing substantiative issues completely, determined that in the media circus of Gay Marriage phobia and angst and True Believer fervor on the topic, to have the media attention leave issues like Robert F. Kennedy's article about election stealing, US military atrocites in Asia, the price of gasoline, the economy's jobless "recover," the rising interest rates and ramping up mortgage default rates, dropping house prices in high-priced markets, offshoring of more and more jobs (including now people traveling to Asia for surgery) and the dropping wages of the average worker in the USA, the spiralling divergence in wealth and income between the majority of the US population and the net value and income and wealth control of the upper 10 and upper one percent most affluent of the US population...
"We control the horizontal. We control the vertical..."
They've hijacked the information channels to most of the population and corrupted the reporting, paid "reporters" to product-placement and plant US Executive Branch propaganda as if it were actual reporting by someone with an interest in honest, impartial reporting, rather than an appartchik or tool of appartchiks, placing "information" in the media the way the old Soviet Empire sent out its propaganda masquearading as reporting.
That's assumes that they actually care for substance and not ideology. They're fascist monster that could be mistaken for reincarnated Stalinists...
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Date: 2006-06-06 04:49 am (UTC)---
Can't really blame the government for falling house prices that directly. Most of the ones falling are the ones that buyers drove up in the past few years.
Once the prices exceed what the market can pay you get a correction. Personally I think a lot of this last bubble was driven by the wider introduction of interest-only loans. Too many people turning over properties in hot markets.
The other side of those falling prices is that more low-mid income earners can afford a house. I was able to buy a condo in Dallas, but no way could I afford one here (where I am on short contract) in Boston. Heck, the two unit house I am living in has a $750,000 market value BEFORE its renovated. My *downtown* condo in Dallas was less than $150,000. My rent is $1400, even with two units there isn't any way to cover more than interest. (my estimate is $4500/mo with a 30y traditional mortgage for this place)
SO glad I don't live out here permanently.
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Date: 2006-06-06 12:10 pm (UTC)Housing prices, especially for condos, have to do with population density and available space -- in other words, supply and demand. The market then creates the insanity of escalating prices. Much as I'd love to blame that on the government... are we going off into tangent-land?
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Date: 2006-06-06 07:34 am (UTC)'nuff said.
Let it fall.
-=Jeff=-