Day: November 20, 2008

Church-Sponsored Web Site Outs Anti-Gay Marriage Supporters

Trish

All those Mormons who are upset that their support of Proposition 8 in California — which took away the right of gay people to marry — is causing uncomfortable scrutiny of their quote unquote religion should take note. KnowThyNeighbor.org is going a step further by publishing the names of those who signed the petition to allow Florida’s version of Prop 8 (which also passed) on the ballot.

Some of those who gleefully supported this ill-conceived and backward amendment are crying foul. They never dreamed anyone would find out, they say.

The database is searchable, allowing you to see if your state senator or representative or governor signed. You can also check your own name for petition fraud. And if you suspect your disagreeable neighbor or homophobic boss signed, now you can find out.

Predictably, some of those who gleefully supported this ill-conceived and backward amendment are crying foul. They never dreamed anyone would find out, they say. But voter petitions are, quite properly, public record.

Sister sites spotlight similar efforts in Oregon and Massachusetts. The Florida site is sponsored by Jacksonville’s Christ Church of Peace.

Christ Church of Peace believes that all people are created equal by our loving Creator. Further, we believe that all tax-paying citizens, regardless of sexual orientation, deserve full equal rights, including the right to enter into civil marriage. And as such, are in agreement with our Florida Constitution.

This is about real, tax paying people being denied fair access to equal rights. Civil marriage is a legal institution, and confers more than 1,000 rights to couples.

Also listed are the five biggest financial contributors to the effort. While the California initiative was funded largely by Republicans and Mormons, Florida’s anti civil rights campaign was waged by Republicans and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family front groups. Note: I suspect there is a typo in the “as of” date, which lists March 31, 2006 instead of 2008.

Republican Party of Florida — $300,000.00
Florida Family Action — $70,946.86
Florida Baptist Convention — $25,000.00
Focus on the Family Action — $23,391.17
Judge Bill — $10,000.00

No, I have no idea who Judge Bill is.

This site is a goldmine of interesting information. Even more important, it sends a message that those who would deny others their rights can’t expect to shoot from the darkness.

Rationalizing the Anti-Gay Vote

Buck Banks

Despite its seemingly liberal-esque name, The Tallahassee Democrat is anything but. So it’s perhaps not surprising that one of its columnists wrote a piece that seems on the surface to be a well-considered view of the other side of the coin on Florida’s own recent vote to enshrine anti-gay bigotry in our state constitution.

Bill Coterell, who writes as the “Capitol Curmudgeon,” penned “Gay-marriage defense faces an uphill battle” for publication in the state capital’s newspaper today. He begins by alleging that economic boycotts such as those being proposed by gay activists in California don’t work, or if they do, they hurt the “little guy,” those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, rather than those who made whatever mischief is being protested.

The huge difference between the civil rights movement and the marriage controversy is that, at least in the backs of their minds, the segregationists knew they were wrong.

Then he slips in a little zinger that provides the first clue to where he’s going in the article:

In one ominous bit of modern McCarthyism, the artistic director of the California Musical Theater was forced out for donating $1,000 to the Prop. 8 campaign. Opponents of the ban announced that they would scour campaign-finance records for names of any other donors whose employers might be sensitive to picketing and boycotts. (emphasis added)

Well, there’s a reason campaign-finance records are public, and anyone donating to a campaign should know that they are making a public statement with their checkbook, and they must be prepared to take responsibility for it.

After musing about whether “provisions of constitutions [should] be for sale, via boycotts of states that won’t enact them or retaliatory firing of people who support them,” Cotterell mounts a classic non-sequitur argument:

Economic reprisal probably won’t amount to much, because people supporting gay marriage tend to be liberal. Liberals believe in church-state separation. Punishing a state for what some prominent members of a church did seems contradictory.

Whoa, there, Billy-boy, let’s examine your argument:

A) People who support gay marriage are liberal.
B) Liberals favor separation of church and state.
c) Therefore, liberals won’t punish an entire state for what some church does.

That doesn’t seem contradictory, just illogical and kind of dumb, Bill.

[…]

John Lennon Covers Everything in Five Minutes

Buck Banks

In 1969, a 14-year-old named Jerry Levitan talked his way into John Lennon’s Toronto hotel room, armed with a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Impressed by the kid’s chutzpah, Lennon obliged him with a five-minute chat that covered war, peace, and the newly arrived Bee Gees.

Levitan teamed up with filmmaker Josh Raskin in 2007 to make “I Met the Walrus,” an animated film that turns Lennon’s thoughts into concrete, if trippy, images. It’s cool.

GOP Obama Supporter Proposes Prop 8 Compromise: Civil Unions for All, Leave ‘Marriage’ to Churches

Jon Ponder

The California Supreme court announced yesterday that it will hear arguments challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the anti-gay amendment that overturned the right of gay people to marry in the state.
The Prop 8 debacle could be resolved by limiting the state of California prospectively to the issuance of civil unions for all couples, rather than marriage licenses, leaving marriage to the churches.
– Kmeic
In May, the same court, which is composed of seven Republicans and one Democrat — who are all elected for 12-year terms — decided 4-3 to strike down a law banning same-sex marriage.

The judges are being asked now to decide whether the constitution can be amended to make discrimination against a minority group legal, a move that directly violates the constitution’s foundational principle of providing protection of rights equally to all residents — or whether a change of that magnitude should have been made through the constitutional “revision” process instead. A revision to the constitution would have required a two-thirds vote by both houses of the legislature before going before the electorate as a ballot initiative.

In a recent San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, Pepperdine law professor Douglas Kmeic, who served as a high official in the Reagan and Bush I Justice departments but who supported Barack Obama this year, laid out a compromise to the constitutional debacle brought on by the passage of Proposition 8 that puts the solution in the hands of California’s governor:

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