In a breathtaking exercise in ill-natured illogic, a divided Ninth Circuit ruled 2–1 that because Prop 8 does not take away civil-union benefits for same-sex couples, it’s an unconstitutional exercise in irrational animus towards gay people.
Uh, that’s not what they said.
Dishonestly, the court claimed it did not require any heightened scrutiny to reach this result.
No, actually they used Romer as precedent. It’s a famous case, Gallagher, look it up.
The very timid dissent (“please don’t go after me!”) points out that Baker v. Nelson is ruling precedent and that the differences between same-sex and opposite sex couples in terms of the state’s interest in responsible procreation could be rationally related to a legitimate state interest.
Yep, and Romer was two decades later. I mean, I’m sure there are folks out there who’d like the courts to appeal constantly to Dred Scott but they’re not good folks.
Back in 2004, when we fought about a Federal Marriage Amendment, gay rights advocates said we were alarmists for claiming that they would go to federal court seeking a right to impose gay marriage on all 50 states.
It’s never a good idea to assume that Brian Brown or NOM are telling the truth, but Joe has this fundraising letter from them posted at his blog, and if what the NOMsters are saying is indeed true, then they’re a little short on cash right now:
Dear Marriage Supporter,
Please help us overcome a looming shortfall!
Increasingly virulent and frequent attacks from the same-sex marriage lobby have depleted our emergency funds, and we need your help!
As 2011 draws to a close, everyone at the National Organization for Marriage is excited about the election year ahead, which we believe will be full of huge victories for traditional marriage.
But unless we raise additional funds quickly, we will be faced with hard decisions about where to begin scaling back our efforts for next year. NOM does not have the resources to accomplish everything we need to do…and with the many new and critical marriage battles upcoming in 2012, this is the exact wrong time for us to have to scale back.
Friend, will you make one emergency year-end gift of $25, $50, $100 or even $1,000 if you can afford it, to NOM right now to help us eliminate our budget shortfall before the end of the year?
Please, please, please? Brian’s loafers are quaking at the prospect of having to get a real job that doesn’t pay him simply for being a bigot.
Anyway, if you read the entire letter from NOM, it will fill you with holiday cheer.
Anti-gay organizations and politicians like Rick Santorum have long argued against marriage equality by saying it would create a slippery slope leading to the legalization of polygamy. It turns out they were wrong, as they tend to be about virtually everything.
On July 20, 2005, Canada became the fourth country in the world to legalize marriage equality for same-sex couples. On Nov. 23, 2011, British Columbia’s highest court ruled that Canada’s 121-year-old criminal law banning polygamy is constitutional. Canada is significantly more liberal than the United States, and British Columbia is more liberal than most of Canada — yet the imagined slippery slope failed to materialize. If Vancouver isn’t buying it — it won’t happen in Kansas.
Wake up fundies — your arguments are baseless and useless.
Social conservatives are very dishonest about this topic. First, they conveniently fail to point out that the issue of polygamy has been around significantly longer than the the issue of marriage equality for same-sex couples. Indeed, the Mormon church had to officially abandon polygamy to pave the way for Utah statehood.
Clearly, this is a longstanding topic of debate that preexisted gay issues in a political context. Arguments for and against polygamy historically have, and will continue, to be fought on its own merit, irrelevant to and regardless of LGBT marriage equality. This point is factual and incontrovertible.
Social conservatives have once again failed to demonstrate the danger of allowing LGBT couples to wed. The Canadian ruling places one more of their flawed and felonious arguments in history’s dumpster. What bizarre talking point will their depraved imaginations come up with next?
Say what you will about Maggie Gallagher — seriously, go ahead, say what you will — but you can’t say she doesn’t like to help, and isn’t that what the spirit of Thanksgiving is about?
Maggie knows that there are millionsthousands at least nine or ten NOM supporters out there who will be spending Thanksgiving this year with their families and that, apropos of absolutely nothing, they will feel the need to tell all their normal well-adjusted family members about how much they hate gays and the gay marriage and the whatsits and the Kids These Days. She also knows that it’s no fun for her minions when Uncle Dave looks at them over the decanter of giblet gravy and says something to the effect of, “Seriously, what’s wrong with you? Why do you spend so much of your time fixated on gay people? What the hell difference does it make to you whether or not my gay son and his partner are married? God, you need a hobby, and probably some therapy, you dumb bigot.” [Total Uncle Dave comment right there.]
So Maggie to the rescue, with this handy video about how to tell everybody that A. You super hate gays and B. It’s your special privilege as a weird fundamentalist of some sort and it doesn’t mean you’re a bigot. These are the three simple steps, after which I have provided example sentences in italics:
1. State your position briefly. [God hates fags.]
2. Refute the charge of bigotry. [No, I didn't say I hate fags, I said God hates fags. I'm not a bigot. Let me show you some verses in my pop-up Bible that I don't really understand.]
3. A call to tolerance. (Repeat as necessary… “or until they bring in the pie.”) [Why won't you tolerate my bigotry?! I only want to use my voting power to deny a minority their constitutional rights based on my pigheaded, hateful version of my religion, nothing more! I AM THE VICTIM HEEEEEEEEEEEERE!!!!!!!, etc. Oh, look, pie! NOM NOM NOM!]
Here’s the video:
Because Maggie is using such a time-honored template for defending bigotry, if you are a white supremacist or misogynist or any other kind of hate-filled goon, feel free to cut out words like “fag” and “gay” above and insert other epithets in Maggie Gallagher’s Handy Guide To Holiday Bigotry. It’s sort of like a Mad Lib!
For the rest of you who are not backwards, hateful oafs, HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM TRUTH WINS OUT.
“It’s becoming increasingly clear that the gay rights movement, the gay marriage movement, really does believe you’re like a racist if you think marriage is the union of husband and wife,” explained Maggie Gallagher, co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage. “They want to rip Genesis out of our Bibles.”
Maybe I should leave it to one of my Christian friends to say this, but it’s adorably quaint listening to a representative of the Religious Right say this, since the entire “family values” Christian Right pretty much ripped the Gospels out of the Bible as the first order of business for their movement. Isn’t that sort of the basis for the religion they claim to follow?
This is NOM’s latest episode of “Grown Adults Bitching and Moaning,” and it features a man named Damian Goddard, who used to be a sportscaster in Canada, where marriage equality has been the law of the land for a while now. Apparently this never turned him into one of Maggie’s Super Victims, but then something happened on Twitter related to New York marriage equality and he shot his mouth off and, as a public figure, presumably embarrassed the hell out of his organization. So he got fired.
When he starts crying about how awesome his wife has been through all of this, the first thought that entered my head was, “huh, yeah, I wonder if same sex married couples ever go through life experiences where one is the rock for the other through hard times. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder!”
Oh, Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown, would either of you know the truth if it smacked you across the face and sang you a big gay showtune?
Rachel Maddow reported last night on NOM’s latest ruse, a pathetic effort to make it appear as if their campaign to repeal marriage rights in New Hampshire has broad popular support — as Rachel points out, supporters of the law outnumber those who want to rescind equal marriage rights by two to one. It seems that Jeremy discovered that, in a sad, sad attempt to make it look as if they have friends people are on their side, the NOMsters have resorted to photoshopping Barack Obama’s crowds to make them look like they’re watching Brian Brown speaking.
As grotesque as it is bitter, as lonely as it is hilarious, these are the actions of losers. Losers who lie a lot.
Andy posted these videos earlier, from New York state town clerks who are derelict in the duties of their jobs. They are victims, you see, because Maggie Gallagher says so. So, as part of Maggie’s new “Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance,” ** three religious bigots made videos whining about the fact that the state won’t give them a pass to do their jobs poorly, on account of their religious beliefs. Watch with the sound up, or watch with the sound down and put on some sad violin music.
Here is Rose, who is a sympathetic victim because all she really wants to do is take care of her cuddly farm animals anyway. Why are all the gays being mean by wanting equality?
Here is Laura Fotusky. Maggie has provided some scary music in order to convince the reader that Laura’s worries about her life being in danger are valid. Also, because it is October, and spooky music is in right now. Laura claims that her religious freedoms have been violated by marriage equality in New York, proving that she is completely unclear on what her religious freedoms actually are.
Finally, here is Ruth. Her video is also full of spooky music! They miss her at work, but she won’t go back because she just can’t imagine performing the duties of a secular government job anymore, now that there might be a gay couple here and there.
Truly, tales of woe and lamentations.
*Maggie’s new thing is apparently to give wingnut organizations really similar names to gay organizations, because that isn’t pathetic or anything.
In the middle of a breathless, stupid missive from the Family Research Council hate group [short version: give us money!], they use the defeat of Anthony Weiner to make themselves and their minions feel better:
Meanwhile in the heart of liberal New York City, pro-family Democrats helped elect a Republican for the first time since the 1920′s. A major deciding factor? The losing Democratic candidate, while in the state senate, offended many of his religious constituents by voting to redefine marriage to appease a small homosexual constituency.
Yeah, no. There is an anti-incumbent atmosphere right now [as there often is with American voters these days, but especially when the economy sucks], and oh, also, Anthony Weiner was a disgraced former congressman. That tends to contribute to whether a party keeps a seat in a special election, even though the Democratic candidate, in this case Weprin, is a totally different person. If this district votes for a Republican again, then we can start talking about “deciding factors” and whatnot. Of course, redistricting is about to, most likely, eliminate that congressional seat anyway, so I’m not sure why we’re even talking about this.
No, Family Research Council, the tide is not turning in your direction, and it’s not going to turn in your direction. I know it makes your followers feel better [and more likely to give you their bingo winnings] to assert such things, but to the rest of us it just looks sad.
Also, read Roy Edroso on this. Maggie Gallagher has had equally stupid things to say about the NY-9 election, and he makes fun of her right nicely.
John Stossel, as a libertarian, is often quite wrong about things, but it’s funny when he’s forced to endure the mendacious ramblings of NOM’s Brian Brown, and even his reaction to it is “come again?”
Brown says gay marriage threatens marriage between a man and a woman. I asked him to explain.
“Marriage is a public good,” he said. “When you redefine marriage, you redefine it for everyone. In states that have redefined marriage, we’ve seen serious consequences, ranging from what is taught in schools — kids in first grade in Massachusetts are taught that it’s the same thing to grow up and marry a boy or a girl — to what happens to religious organizations or organizations that just believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman. … You see Catholic Charities’ adoption agency essentially being forced out of being able to adopt kids because the state said it is discriminating.”
Whoa. Those are three separate points. I don’t see a problem with the first: If they redefine marriage to include gays, that doesn’t diminish my marriage. And if kids are taught that gay marriage is OK, so what?
[...]
“Deconstructing marriage is a very bad idea,” said Brown. “We see the rising rates of divorce and unwed motherhood. There is a direct correlation. If you look at any social indicators — children raised without mothers and fathers — you see higher rates of incarceration, juvenile delinquency that cost the state money.”
Sorry, but I still don’t see what divorce and unwed motherhood have to do with gay marriage. It’s mostly straight people who are doing the divorcing and unwed mothering.
[...]
“The state should support what is true and good and beautiful,” Brown countered. “And it’s true and good and beautiful that marriage is the union of a man and a woman. Men and women are unique and special.”
I still don’t get his argument.
It’s very simple, John. Brian doesn’t have an argument, at least not in the grown-up sense. All he knows is that he and Maggie Gallagher have a deep psychological problem with gay people, and that airing their personal issues loudly, in public, has proven to be quite profitable. The first mistake when dealing with people like NOM is to pretend that we’re dealing with mature, intelligent adults. It’s sorta like the problem Obama has when he deals with the Republican party…
It’s better to handle them as if you’re dealing with a particularly ill-behaved, dishonest third grader and then work downward based on their future behavior.
Bonnie: I'm not crazy about the ad. I find it a bit juvenile and insulting to porn actors. But...
PhillipP: She looks and sounds like she just tumbled out of a meth trailer in a trailer park....
Paterfamilias: Shmuel: Point is, once a gonif always a gonif....
Peter Hargmier: He talks of a youtube clip of Mayor Cory Booker responding to a question about gay marriage.
He nails it!
Enjoy! :D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Z7tl7Vy8U...
Michael: "But to protest the teaching of these facts is little different from protesting their very existence; it is like opposing...
Anti-gay organizations and politicians like Rick Santorum have long argued against marriage equality by saying it would create a slippery slope leading to the legalization of polygamy. It turns out they were wrong, as they tend to be about virtually everything.
