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Tee hee. I was waiting to hear the reaction of Daddy D to last week’s statement by the President on marriage equality. James Dobson, the founder of the professional bigotry and discrimination organization Focus On the Family, and currently president and founder of James Dobson’s Family Talk, laid into President Obama in predictable fashion on the anti-gay, womb-controlling and birther conspiracy “news” outlet WND.
Mr. President, I hope you live to regret ripping into the institution of marriage, which has been foundational to the social order of all nations. It must continue to be protected in law and practice if the family is to survive in this shock-wave world.
Despite that statement, he’s a bit less apocalyptic than many on the right, and zings Barack Obama on his states’ rights problem.
He said he favors each state’s right to determine the definition of marriage – yet isn’t that precisely what the people of North Carolina did last week? Was their vote of 61 to 39 percent in favor of traditional marriage a fluke, or was it the result of the citizens of North Carolina making their own choice?
And speaking of states’ rights to define marriage, wouldn’t that wreak havoc on individual families? Imagine the chaos of a couple being married in Texas but not married in Arkansas, or being married in Arizona and not married in Massachusetts. Children in one state would be legitimate, but would be the product of unmarried parents in the next. And what about the jurisdiction of the federal and state courts? Could they continue to override the will of the people, as did the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California? And what about inheritance issues from state to state? You would think the president of the United States would have thought through his position and its implications before impulsively making it known to the nation. If traditional marriage is not the law of the land, the institution of the family will cease to exist.
Well, yes, I agree with him on the insanity and current reality of being married in one state and not, however resolving that problem will destroy the family no faster than it’s already disintegrating because of divorce, poverty, child abuse and other issues. But the President punts on this, because he — and James Dobson — know this inconsistency can only be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in the end. The people of North Carolina shouldn’t have had this measure on the ballot before them in the first place. Dobson and his ilk are always hanging their hopes (and paychecks) on “the people” — the fearful, often willfully ignorant of church-state separation people — to decide the civil rights of others.
And that’s why the fate of the Supreme Court is, IMHO, the single most important reason to get your ass out to vote against Mitt Romney in the fall.
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Challenging Amendment One
Speaking of NC, the state’s largest LGBT advocacy org has announced that it and the ALCU are looking at the possibility of challenging Amendment One in court. Stuart Campbell of Equality NC:
As we recover from the terrible disappointment of last week’s primary election, many are wondering, what’s next on the road ahead? We know that even though this ugly amendment passed, it is not reflective of the North Carolina we know and love. This is our state.
To that end, Equality NC remains strongly committed to advocating on behalf of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community of North Carolina. You may have heard me say this before, but I believe that this assault on the LGBT community has left us stronger, more organized, and more dedicated to full equality in North Carolina. The small-minded, cynical politicians who placed Amendment One on the ballot may have won this battle, but we know they are on the losing side of history.
This week, Equality NC will explore the road ahead by hitting the road, announcing statewide town hall meetings designed to provide an opportunity for supporters like you to look forward and learn how together we will continue to fight for full equality by electing pro-equality legislators, being effective grassroots leaders in our communities, and doing the vital work of sharing our stories.
Even as we travel the state, we will also be partnering with great organizations and knowledgeable attorneys across the state to provide legal clinics so that LGBT couples can learn how to protect themselves against the real harms of this amendment. We’ll announce details later this month.
All the while, we will be working with ACLU-NC and other legal experts in the state to evaluate and consider the possibility of a legal challenge to this broad and vague amendment. After all, the poorly-written Amendment One is vulnerable for many reasons, and we’re dedicated to finding the best options for fighting this discriminatory blight on our state’s constitution.
6 Comments
The family sounds like a rather weak institution if it requires legal protection to “survive”. Not that I expect anything less disingenuous from that idiot.
The amendment prohibits certain people from even entering into otherwise legal contractual agreements. I’m not an attorney, but know enough business law to know that can’t really stand much of a court challenge.
I suspect Amendment One is susceptible to the same argument used in Prop. 8, namely it takes away rights improperly from a minority. Such rights are in the area of civil unions and not necessarily marriage. In a state like North Carolina, the emphasis should be on achieving civil unions, i.e. marriage in everything but name. Religious bigots played their cards skillfully as they got rid of everything by tying it all to the word marriage. The word marriage is not going to fly anytime soon in North Carolina and is a waste of time to pursue currently.
Now they Want to team up with ACLU to sue, i guess they need more money, since they wasted a lot by opening new offices in the West, while ignoring the east. that is why we lost.. ENC picking and choosing with communities were more important than others. they only hold events/town halls in the east after being call out about them not including the east.. the lost of Amendment one is solely or largely can be blame on ENC directly.. No wonder why Ian left when he did.
I agree that we need to do everything we can to see that Mitt Romney- of all people!- does not win the Presidency in November. He is just the handyman that the extremists need to implement some of the most cruel plans that we’ve ever seen. He has no backbone, so he’ll be (and already is) like putty in their short-sighted hands, unless, of course, he gets a backbone after all and then we’ll all be SOL.
Not a time when I’d get any satisfaction out of saying, “I told you so.”
And as for James Dobson, I’ll admit that back when I was a new parent- not so recently, I wanted to give this man the benefit of the doubt. Gave him an inch and he took a mile. Hi meanness gets more entrenched each time he opens his mouth. He is a patriarchal narcissist who, like the rest of them, gets an incredibly surprising amount of attention.
What the heck is going on anymore??
For me, the best part of Dobson’s article was this statement, where he said that heterosexist marriage has existed for 2,000 years longer than the Earth itself (by Bible leteralits’s standards)!