Can anyone, ANYONE, please tell me why George Wanker Bush will not come out and say he is a hypocritical homophobe? Please tell.
Of course most people ARE NOT single issue voters. There are some opponents of abortion that are, but most people don't vote on a single issue.
Of course during the 2000 campaign Bush said that he was in favor of equal rights for everyone, but not special rights for anyone. Now he wants marriage to be a special right for some people and not others.
Allow me to do a TJ impersonation for the other side. Who's position on gay marriage is closer to Al Qaeda's? The republicans who want to ban it of course. Fight terrorism... Support gay marriage.
How stupid. Putting an amendment like this in the constitution seems like vandalism. It'd be the same thing for them to insist that "Dubya was here" be stamped on every printed copy of the constitution from here on out.
Oh, good point! I just remembered that she's "one of the damned" of this proposed amendment. Cheney would score huge points with me if he publically broke with Bush on this and spoke against it. Ain't gonna happen. Pity.
eloquent article over at yaledailynews about this: http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=24015 -- Carve me up some handprint turkey ERIC EAGAN I don't know where I'll be at 40, but I hope I'm married with children -- the old ball and chain. I love that stuff! It's hard to imagine right now, especially when so many people in this country want to keep me permanently single, but I'm hoping they'll all be dead soon. Then I'll have my white picket fence, my minivan, my rugrats digging up worms in the front yard, and my coffee mug that declares me the "Best Daddy in the World!" I suppose that part of my paternal aspiration is that I don't really know what I'd be doing with myself otherwise. Go out all the time with the folks from work? No sir. Frankly, adult friendships always seemed sort of pathetic to me. Sure, they're OK on the side, but do I really want to make a life out of belly-laughing through fancy dinners and insisting that I pay the check? (Adult friends always do that.) What happens when everyone else goes home to their families? Thanksgiving rolls around, and I'm asking myself: delivery or DiGiorno? Then at work the next day, the boss is rhapsodizing about little Cody's handprint turkey, which he brought into work and is now stuck on the snackroom fridge for the whole office to see. Well I want a handprint turkey, too. Is that too much to ask? Seriously, though, parenthood is not all about the cute trappings. Anyone who thinks so was never peed on by a giggling infant. How my parents raised four, I don't know. I do know they managed to keep cool heads about everything, no matter what we threw at them. This is a good lesson to learn. There are some things as a parent I just won't be able to avoid: something expensive is going to get broken, one of my children will get a splinter and refuse to let me take it out, and at least once one of them will yell in the middle of a tantrum, "I hate you!" I remember yelling this to my Mom when I was six and being disappointed by her response, which was something like, "Well, I still love you." Seems she had been tipped off by something she read in the newspaper. Stopped my tantrum cold. Oh, and there will be an argument over what cereal to buy, which is why my kids will never see the inside of a grocery store. I'll call it "the bad place," where only Daddy can go in without dying. Then, when I come home with groceries, they'll be so happy to see me alive, they won't care that I got King Vitamin instead of Count Chocula. The real challenge, I've been told, is puberty. Compared to kindergarteners, adolescents are totally impossible. They're hormonal nightmares who want to be treated like babies one minute, and sophisticated adults the next. Thirteen-year-olds are the worst because they're at a hygienic crossroads. They can no longer insist that swimming in a chlorinated pool is equivalent to a bath, the way my siblings and I used to do. And one day they have to start shaving, but they invariably start way too late. (One boy in my class insisted for years his Burt Reynolds mustache was "just peach fuzz" -- he didn't shave it until he was 16.) All this confusion means they look awkward and smell less than savory. While you're busy offending them with suggestions that they don't have everything figured out, they're busy offending you with body odor. That and slamming doors in your face and saying they hate you, only this time they probably mean it. It won't be easy, but it'll be worth it to have a family. When things are bad, they can probably seem unmanageable, but when they're good, there's nothing like it in the world. A family that eats together at a big table, and drinks together when the kids are old enough. A family that tells jokes, does impressions, sings songs out of key. Dorky, I know, but also sublime and wonderful, and totally worth the effort. I'll have help, hopefully, from another Daddy. The kids will call him "Papa" to avoid confusion -- and Papa and I will show up together to our daughter's softball game and our son's science fair. My kids won't think anything of it until some snot-nosed brat at school says, "Your daddies are gay, and so are you!" To which my kid, if I taught him right, will say, "Two daddies can kick the crap out of one daddy and a mommy." Though maybe by the time I'm a parent, the cultural trend towards homosexual acceptance will have reached the playground. I sincerely hope so. And I hope that when I'm a parent, my husband and I will be legally married, and both of us will be considered legally the parents of our children. I don't see why we shouldn't be. Just what about marriage are opponents to gay marriage really trying to defend? Sanctity? To that, I remind you of the blessed union of Liza Minnelli and David Gest. Or the half of American marriages that end in divorce. Still, some people feel so strongly about gay marriage, they want a constitutional amendment banning it. Some worry that legalized gay marriage will open the doors up to rampant gay adoption. Soon we'll be a nation raised by homosexuals! And what's wrong with that, I wonder. Better than a nation raised by television, or parents who don't want them. And I want kids. Always have. Maybe not this second -- I've got four final papers to write before the semester's over -- but at some point, when my life has mellowed out and I've found a Papa. That, and a surrogate to carry our baby if we choose to go that route. Any takers? We will pay you handsomely -- in handprint turkeys. Eric Eagan is being difficult -- as usual.
He has spoken against it. Four years ago. CNN played a clip of Cheney at one of the 00 VP debates and he said he was against a constitutional amendment.
There's Something About Mary Gay-marriage proponents target the veep's daughter By Mark Miller and Debra Rosenberg Newsweek Feb. 23 issue - In a campaign consumed with Vietnam War records and elusive weapons of mass destruction, the candidates have so far tiptoed around the season's touchiest wedge issue: gay marriage. Though advisers to George W. Bush hinted that the president would soon throw his support behind an amendment to the U.S. Constitution limiting marriage to the union of one man and one woman, he has yet to do so. And John Kerry hasn't been eager to detail his more nuanced stance against both gay marriage and any constitutional effort to ban it. The issue holds dangers for both sides. While Bush could rally his conservative base by backing an amendment, he doesn't want to alienate moderate voters by seeming mean-spirited. Kerry wants to stake out middle ground without seeming like another out-of-step Massachusetts liberal. Yet with grass-roots activists across the country ratcheting up the volume last week, the candidates may be dragged into the center of the latest cultural battle sooner than they'd like. Activists on both sides are launching guerrilla strikes. Conservatives have railed against same-sex marriage on talk radio and e-mail networks for months. Now they're lobbying in statehouses across the country. In San Francisco, hundreds of gay couples raced to impromptu weddings on the steps of city hall's ornate rotunda, where Mayor Gavin Newsom defiantly began issuing same-sex licenses in apparent violation of California law. "I don't accept that I'm breaking the law," Newsom told NEWSWEEK. "This is about not allowing discrimination." In Massachusetts last week, foes of gay marriage scrambled to pass a constitutional ban. They failed but will try again next month. And in the most audacious surprise attack yet, a new Web site targeted Mary Cheney, the openly lesbian daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney. Within an hour of its launch, DearMary.com attracted 100 emotional letters pleading with her to weigh in against a constitutional amendment. "Where is your courage, Mary?" asked one. "Your community needs you to voice your dissent." As director of vice presidential operations for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Mary Cheney makes an inviting target. In 2000 the Cheney family insisted that Mary was a private citizen and off-limits to the press. Even so, her presence seemed to bolster the "compassionate conservative" image the Bush-Cheney ticket hoped to portray. After her father became veep, Mary joined the gay-friendly Republican Unity Coalition and gave speeches encouraging the GOP to reach out to women, minorities and gays. "We can make sexual orientation a nonissue for the Republican Party, and we can help achieve equality for all gay and lesbian Americans," she said in an April 2002 statement. But when she joined the '04 campaign last year, Mary quit the coalition and seemed to fade into her own undisclosed location. Now that Mary, 34, is a senior campaign official, the Web site hopes to shame her back into the spotlight. Still, the effort's ultimate target isn't Mary but her dad's boss. (The Bush-Cheney campaign declined to comment.) Though Dick Cheney at one time seemed sympathetic to gay unions—in a 2000 debate with Joe Lieberman he said the issue should be left to the states—last month he said he would support "whatever decision" Bush makes. "I think the American people deserve to know he is willing to sell out his daughter for votes. It says something about his character," says John Aravosis, a Washington, D.C., political consultant who founded the site along with Los Angeles activist Robin Tyler. The two have a solid track record: in 2000 they helped force conservative talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlesinger off television with a similar campaign. This week they plan an e-mail ad picturing Mary's face on a milk carton. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? it asks, noting that she's been "silent since her father endorsed anti-gay constitutional amendment making her and millions of Americans second-class citizens." Says Aravosis: "I think Mary is our last best hope to stopping this amendment." Even if last week's skirmishes turn out to be more symbolism than substance—it's doubtful the California marriages will hold up in court—they're proof that gay marriage is nudging its way onto the campaign trail. With Karen Breslau in San Francisco © 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
"The fact of the matter is, we live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for everybody," Cheney said. "And I think that means that people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It's really no one else's business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard. "The next step, then ... is the question you ask of whether or not there ought to be some kind of official sanction, if you will, of the relationship. That matter is regulated by the states. I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions, and that's appropriate. I don't think there should necessarily be a federal policy." -Dick Cheney, 2000
Andy Sullivan... __________________ WAR IS DECLARED: The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. Rather than allow the contentious and difficult issue of equal marriage rights to be fought over in the states, rather than let politics and the law take their course, rather than keep the Constitution out of the culture wars, this president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens - and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself. The document that should be uniting the country will now be used to divide it, to single out a group of people for discrimination itself, and to do so for narrow electoral purposes. Not since the horrifying legacy of Constitutional racial discrimination in this country has such a goal been even thought of, let alone pursued. Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth. NO MORE PROFOUND AN ATTACK: This president wants our families denied civil protection and civil acknowledgment. He wants us stigmatized not just by a law, not just by his inability even to call us by name, not by his minions on the religious right. He wants us stigmatized in the very founding document of America. There can be no more profound attack on a minority in the United States - or on the promise of freedom that America represents. That very tactic is so shocking in its prejudice, so clear in its intent, so extreme in its implications that it leaves people of good will little lee-way. This president has now made the Republican party an emblem of exclusion and division and intolerance. Gay people will now regard it as their enemy for generations - and rightly so. I knew this was coming, but the way in which it has been delivered and the actual fact of its occurrence is so deeply depressing it is still hard to absorb. But the result is clear, at least for those who care about the Constitution and care about civil rights. We must oppose this extremism with everything we can muster. We must appeal to the fair-minded center of the country that balks at the hatred and fear that much of the religious right feeds on. We must prevent this graffiti from being written on a document every person in this country should be able to regard as their own. This struggle is hard but it is also easy. The president has made it easy. He's a simple man and he divides the world into friends and foes. He has now made a whole group of Americans - and their families and their friends - his enemy. We have no alternative but to defend ourselves and our families from this attack. And we will.
While I don't think that the Constitution is a magic piece of paper that cannot be touched, there is just something unseemly about this. This might be inaccurate, but the constitution (not including the preamble) is fairly short on moral judgments. What moral judgments that are in there are relatively indirect, and deal with human rights issues: prohibition on Cruel and Unusual punishment, prohibition against slavery, extending the franchise to women and people of color, etc. A ban on gay marriage? Where does that fit in? Rather than extending or preserving rights for a class of citizens, this amendment is designed to limit rights to a select majority. I'm pretty sure that that is one of the reasons why we have a constitution in the first place, to keep that from happening. The last time we had a Constitutional amendment most similar to this was the prohibtion on the sale of intoxicating liquors; now that was a smashing success.....
Republican! You who call for less government interference in our lives! DEFEND YOURSELF!!!! Vote your conscience!
