Losing to win

Sometimes, to lose is to win.

I say this because I’m secretly hoping that tomorrow, when the California Supreme Court releases its decision on same sex marriage, that we lose.

I know. Shocking for me to say, isn’t it? But it’s true. I hope the court lets Proposition 8 stand.

Go ahead, call me a traitor if you like. Not like that’s never happened before. But I have what I think are some pretty good reasons. Two of them, if you’re looking for details.

First, in the event of an adverse ruling, the same-sex marriage folks in California will do the same thing the Prop 8 people have done – they’ll put a ballot initiative up every year, over and over again, until it wins. And it will win. The river progress is with us on this. It’s only a matter of time. We’d just trade immediate gratification for – in my view – a more secure decision later.

Which brings me to reason No. 2. We’re dealing with some very unstable people here. A significant number of the anti-same-sex marriage crowd is not dealing with a full deck on this or very many other issues.

They sincerely believe that allowing gay men and lesbians to marry would be the end of civilization as we know it. In a way, they’re right – but they’re predicting a decline into depravity and wanton sin, while I’m seeing a more holistic society that fully values every member. Two completely different views that have absolutely nothing in common.

Because they see nothing good ever coming from same-sex marriage, they’re pretty much prepared to do anything they have to in order to prevent that from ever happening.

Anything.

If they lose, it won’t be because their proposition violated the California constitution. It’ll be because liberal activist judges nullified the will of the people. It will piss them off. A lot. It will make them crazier than they already are. Dave Neiwart at Orcinus:

And you can bet that right-wing True Believers across the country are going to be looking for targets to take out their frustration on. As I’ve written recently, they already think this government is not their own, and are moving into opposition to it. They really believe that the continued greatness of America is at stake, and they are the last line of defense against complete moral chaos. If this happens, God will withdraw his blessing from the US, and America will lose everything. They will not let that happen. Passing a gay marriage law in California -- the biggest and most influential state of all -- will be their Harper's Ferry, their Pearl Harbor. After that -- the deluge.

And there are more of them than you think. Not enough to win. But enough to inflict serious damage on this country – already reeling from the moral, legal and economic disaster that was the Bush administration.

And worse yet is the potential damage they could inflict on us. They don’t see us as human, not we gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered folk and not you “normal” folk who support us. We’re the enemy. We’re what’s keeping them from God’s kingdom. And God, that jealous, vengeful and spiteful deity, has no use for us.

We’re expendable.

The country is strong enough to withstand this demagoguery. It would suffer a blow, perhaps even a devastating one that brings us to our knees. But it won’t kill us as a country.

It could kill us as a people, as innocent humans doing nothing more than living our lives as we have a right to do.

So, I hope we lose. We don’t need to be in such a hurry, not at the price we could be forced to pay for victory. California is too big – it’s not Vermont, or New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut or Massachusetts. For the right wing to lose there push those among them already too close to the edge over that lip and into the abyss of complete insanity.

The potential for violence is undeniable. And frankly, I’d rather see us avoid a bloodbath and wait just a little longer. I know I’d feel safer. And I'd feel better about the rest of you, too.

We'll win this one. If not now, later, but it will happen. I'd just like to see us do it with no loss of life.


AWOP Political Contributing Editor

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Dykes and fags and fairies oh my

Well, boys and girls, Vermont's gone and done it. Yes, the state that first brought us civil unions has now decided that separate but not even close to equal just isn't good enough.

And it wasn't those dastardly, black-robed activist judges who made it happen. Oh, no. Vermont, my dear friends, is now the first state to legislate marriage for same-sex couples. And they did it by overriding a Republican governor's veto.

It was kind of a "Fuck you, Jim Douglas," too. See, Gov. Jim announced that he was going to veto the bill before the Vermont House even voted for it. They voted, and passed it, but not by enough to override. But then the handful of Democrats who voted against it got a little pissed off at the governor's arrogance, and, well, they voted for it the second time around.

So, fuck you, Gov. Douglas.

Even now, heterosexual couples in Vermont are filing for divorce in record numbers, knowing that their marriages have been torn assunder by the wicked legislature.

Of course, it's still unequal, since the federal government, to placate the religious fundamentalists in this country, made sure that no other state had to recognize another state's same-sex couple marriage, and no federal law governing things like taxes and such applies, but hey, we're moving in the right direction.

And good lord, does that scare the bejesus out of those anachronistic lost souls. Pam Spaulding, who is a far braver woman than I, went fishing on the Free Republic sites and came back with a sampling of their drivel. This was my favorite:

This looks like the MO of the gay marriage activists:
1. Have gay marriage put on the ballot.
2. Ignore the results if they don’t go your way, throw a fit.
3. Take your case to the legislature, where it’s legalized anyway. Screw the people!
4. Gay marriage legalized. Those silly citizens, thinking they had a say ... Checkmate!

Actually, it's never been the "gay marriage activists" who "have gay marriage put on the ballot." It's always the backwards-thinking bigots who are a) trying to make sure that no such travesty as same-sex marriage ever comes near them or b) trying to reverse a decision in favor of same-sex marriage that's already been taken, usually a decision of the aforementioned black-hearted activist judges.

And now it's screwing the people to have state legislators, elected by the people, make the decisions they were elected to make. I guess next we'll be hearing about activist legislators.

Update: Well, low and behold. The Rude Pundit, who weekly receives directions for his prayers from the Family Research Council (which will be mentioned in two more paragraphs here), got his weekly prayer targets and guess what it says.

Give consolation, strength and courage to pro-family believers in Vermont. May other states take warning and secure marriage against usurpation by determined homosexual activists and judicial and legislative activists!

End update.

Better to put it on the ballot so the Mormons and Catholics can spend millions to promote lies and make sure it goes down to defeat.

Tony Perkins at the Family Research Council, which, in case you didn't know, is an offshoot of Jim Dobson's Focus on the Family, was all in a tither about Vermont, along with a DC city council vote saying that the District of Columbia would recognize all marriages performed in the states -- even though Tony really doesn't have to worry about that. Congress has to approve anything like that, because DC doesn't have home rule, and Congress doesn't yet understand that the religious fundamentalists here have pretty much lost their mojo. But here's what poor Tony said.

Same-sex 'marriage' is a movement driven by wealthy homosexual activists and a liberal elite determined to destroy not only the institution of marriage, but democracy as well. Time and again, we see when citizens have the opportunity to vote at the ballot box, they consistently opt to support traditional marriage.

Notice how he had to put quotes around "marriage" there to show us his disdain for the very idea of same-sex marriage, that it most certainly is not marriage. And wow, after eight years of the Bush administration ripping the Constitution to shreds, its us little ole queers who are destroying democracy. Such power. I feel positively giddy with it.

I imagine marriage for Tony is probably still the exchange of property between a woman's father and her husband like it was for centuries, because he and others like him sure go on about "tradition" when they get started talking about marriage.

So if you really want to talk about tradition, I suppose Tony should decide which tradition. He's a white guy, so let's assume he'll want to go with some European tradition. Now, the oldest European traditions that we know of are the Greeks and Romans, and for the most part, marriage for Greeks and Romans just required that you kinda stand there and say, "We're married," or whatever the equivalent was in Greek or Latin. There was nothing civil or religious about it. Marriage was just a business deal, Dad selling off the product (his daughter) to the husband.

The Romans did have one type of marriage wherein the woman remained the property of her family and under her father's authority. Not sure what that was about.

In fact, it wasn't until 1545 that there was any real marriage ceremony at all, and that was decreed by the Roman Catholic church. Protestant religions kept the old style marriage for a while longer. But now you have religious intrusion into marriage, which had previously been a family thing. The religious intrusion didn't change the property aspects, though. Since Tony's a real religious guy, I'm guessing this is probably the tradition he's talking about.

I'm sure he didn't like the late entry of the government into marriage, which came about in the 19th century. Under state marriage acts, couples could declare their marriage before the appropriate government official, and still have a religious ceremony, if they so chose, but it wasn't necessary.

Tony, and the rest of the sex-obsessed fundamentalists, never really understood civil marriage. That's why they keep screaming about traditional marriage, as if it's always been the way it is in their foggy little brains, weak from too little use.

But times are changing, Tony et al. You ain't gonna put this genie back in the bottle, no matter how many millions you spend trying to do it.

And the only activist judges I see are the ones who are trying to stop the clock on progress. Give me a thoughful, open-minded jurist any day to one whose ideas haven't moved out of the 16th century.


And really, backwards religionists, you can have whatever kind of marriage you want in your establishments. Nobody's gonna stop you. That's just another one of the little lies you use to delude yourselves and to trick others into believing that same-sex marriage will interfere with their rights of free association.

It won't. It was religion, not the state, that inserted itself into marriage, which, while not at all equitable to women, at least didn't have the ridiculous rules the church put on it. It could have evolved (oh, I know, you hate that word) much better without that limiting input.

We've still got a ways to go before the United States can join the sane nations like Canada and Sweden, but we'll get there.

It is far too late to stop it.


News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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