Proposition_8 has passed?
« on: 2008-11-05 19:13:51 »
Source:Wikipedia: Proposition 8 is an initiative state constitutional amendment on the 2008 California General Election ballot, titled Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry. If passed, the proposition would "change the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California." A new section would be added stating "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."
And Proposition 8 has passed. *stomach turns in disappointment & disgust*
Re:Proposition_8 has passed?
« Reply #1 on: 2008-11-06 21:57:49 »
they got money pouring in from the mormon church..why? i dont know. one would imagine that the mormon church would not want to say anything about 'traditional marriage' considering the skeletons in *their* closet.
Re:Proposition_8 has passed?
« Reply #2 on: 2008-11-06 22:37:03 »
I think the better strategy for gay-rights folk, would be to seek to abolish marriage . . . that is that the government should not be in business of granting people a license to marry. As far as the government is concerned, all marriages should be viewed as domestic agreements. The only thing that government should do is #1 make sure that both parties have an actual contractual agreement, and #2 publicly record such agreements to avoid fraud, and succeeding at those two criteria, the state should do no more than to recognize the good faith, not the actual marriage itself.
Marriage is a religious institution, and good principles of seperation dictate that goverment/state should only engage in these two functions. It's up to religious/spiritual communities to recognize any particular domestic agreement as a marriage. Nobody has a RIGHT to marriage, they only possess such privilege within a community that recognizes it as such based on their own values and the good faith insured by the domestic agreement.
Personally I'm very open to gay people forming domestic unions and joining communities which support those unions as a marriage, but I think this is a much more palatable and pragmatic way to achieve that goal.
Re:Proposition_8 has passed?
« Reply #3 on: 2008-11-11 09:27:38 »
11/10/08 - Keith Olbermann delivers an emotional Special Comment on the outcome of California's voting of Prop 8 which eliminated the right of same-sex couples to marry.
Just when I thought I was out-they pull me back in
Re:Proposition_8 has passed?
« Reply #4 on: 2008-11-11 16:59:32 »
Special Comment: The Passage of Prop 8 Posted: Monday, November 10, 2008 9:01 PM by Countdown Filed Under: Special Comment
by Keith Olbermann
Finally tonight as promised, a Special Comment on the passage, last week, of Proposition Eight in California, which rescinded the right of same-sex couples to marry, and tilted the balance on this issue, from coast to coast.
Some parameters, as preface. This isn't about yelling, and this isn't about politics, and this isn't really just about Prop-8. And I don't have a personal investment in this: I'm not gay, I had to strain to think of one member of even my very extended family who is, I have no personal stories of close friends or colleagues fighting the prejudice that still pervades their lives.
And yet to me this vote is horrible. Horrible. Because this isn't about yelling, and this isn't about politics.
This is about the... human heart, and if that sounds corny, so be it.
If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not... understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don't want to deny you yours. They don't want to take anything away from you. They want what you want -- a chance to be a little less alone in the world.
Only now you are saying to them -- no. You can't have it on these terms. Maybe something similar. If they behave. If they don't cause too much trouble. You'll even give them all the same legal rights -- even as you're taking away the legal right, which they already had. A world around them, still anchored in love and marriage, and you are saying, no, you can't marry. What if somebody passed a law that said you couldn't marry?
I keep hearing this term "re-defining" marriage.
If this country hadn't re-defined marriage, black people still couldn't marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal... in 1967. 1967.
The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn't have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead. But it's worse than that. If this country had not "re-defined" marriage, some black people still couldn't marry...black people. It is one of the most overlooked and cruelest parts of our sad story of slavery. Marriages were not legally recognized, if the people were slaves. Since slaves were property, they could not legally be husband and wife, or mother and child. Their marriage vows were different: not "Until Death, Do You Part," but "Until Death or Distance, Do You Part." Marriages among slaves were not legally recognized.
You know, just like marriages today in California are not legally recognized, if the people are... gay.
And uncountable in our history are the number of men and women, forced by society into marrying the opposite sex, in sham marriages, or marriages of convenience, or just marriages of not knowing -- centuries of men and women who have lived their lives in shame and unhappiness, and who have, through a lie to themselves or others, broken countless other lives, of spouses and children... All because we said a man couldn't marry another man, or a woman couldn't marry another woman. The sanctity of marriage. How many marriages like that have there been and how on earth do they increase the "sanctity" of marriage rather than render the term, meaningless?
What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don't you, as human beings, have to embrace... that love? The world is barren enough.
It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.
And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?
With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate... this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness -- this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness -- share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
---
You are asked now, by your country, and perhaps by your creator, to stand on one side or another. You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand, on a question of...love. All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate. You don't have to help it, you don't have it applaud it, you don't have to fight for it. Just don't put it out. Just don't extinguish it. Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don't know and you don't understand and maybe you don't even want to know...It is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow **person...
Just because this is the only world we have. And the other guy counts, too.
This is the second time in ten days I find myself concluding by turning to, of all things, the closing plea for mercy by Clarence Darrow in a murder trial.
But what he said, fits what is really at the heart of this:
"I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar-Khayyam," he told the judge.
"It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all:
11/10/08 - Keith Olbermann delivers an emotional Special Comment on the outcome of California's voting of Prop 8 which eliminated the right of same-sex couples to marry.
11/10/08 - Keith Olbermann delivers an emotional Special Comment on the outcome of California's voting of Prop 8 which eliminated the right of same-sex couples to marry.
Even as Barack Obama's Tuesday election to the presidency was being hailed as a triumph for social justice throughout most of the United States, it was sowing discord in California, where ballot Proposition 8 forbidding gay marriage under the state constitution surged to a surprising victory and turned the state into a powderkeg. The California Supreme Court ruled in May that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, and since then an estimated 18,000 couples have done so. But now Proposition 8 has amended the state constitution to read that "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California," putting the state's existing gay marriages in legal limbo.
The campaign was bitterly fought—it was, indeed, the most expensively funded one in the country aside from the presidential race—and a low-level, occasionally violent civil war has broken out between gays and lesbians, who have taken to the streets every night to protest, and the Mormon and Catholic Churches. But the horrible truth is that the traditionalist churches needed help to pass Proposition 8—and that help came from black voters brought to the polls by Barack Obama. The measure lost outright among white and Asian voters; it won by more than two to one amongst blacks, who mostly belong to deeply conservative evangelical churches and who turned out on Nov. 4 in unprecedented numbers.
Gay marriage has a poor track record at the polls in America. As civil-rights lawyer Dale Carpenter points out, the loss in California ran its record in state ballot fights to a dismal 0-for-30. Proposition 8 was perhaps the best chance ever for that streak to be broken, but the presence of a popular Democrat at the head of a national ticket appears to have hurt, not helped. (Sen. Obama didn't improve matters by taking a relatively gutless stance on the gay-marriage issue; although he opposed Prop. 8, his personal opposition to gay marriage on Christian principles gave pro-8 campaigners sound bites to play in robo-calls to black-dominated California zip codes.) Dan Savage, perhaps the single most widely-read gay columnist in the U.S., greeted the dawn of November 5 with tough words:
I'm thrilled that we've just elected our first African-American president. I wept last night. I wept reading the papers this morning. But I can't help but feeling hurt that the love and support aren't mutual. I do know this, though: I'm done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there—and they're out there, and I think they're scum—are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color.
Others are reciting the party line that tension between minority groups can only serve the interests of the ruling class, The Man, or whatnot; but if the tension is there, how long can people be expected to, as Savage put it, "pretend" it doesn't exist? It's not just about keeping a lid on black homophobia, but perhaps even gay racism too: the election aftermath finds Andrew Sullivan, the nonpartisan laureate of gay politics, doing some soul-searching, noting that gays backed John Kerry in distinctly greater numbers than they did Barack Obama. The gay establishment, he points out, went into the tank early for Hilary Clinton, and he approvingly quotes a reader:
I have to say, anecdotally among gay friends I notice a certain amount of casual racism that shocks me, notwithstanding the dancing to black music and the supposedly affectionate impersonations of black voices. People talk about the irony of blacks voting for Obama but against Prop 8. Well, let's also talk seriously about the irony of gay people voting Republican in greater numbers than ever before—in the year of Obama.
It's enough to make you glad you live in a country where such matters are handled entirely undemocratically! Like it or not, we do avoid a certain amount of genuine unpleasantness that way.
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