Here’s what we Minnesotans get to look forward to on our TV screens for the next month, an ad against gay marriage.
So their only argument is this “But they’re redefining marriage!” nonsense? Why should we care? If the law specified a thousand more special cases, it wouldn’t affect my relationship with my wife in the slightest.
As for their argument that they just want to give the people the right to decide…that doesn’t fly either. Civil rights, especially granting equality to a minority, is not a matter to be decided by a majority vote.
I might just have to keep my TV off until November.
(via Joe. My. God.)
We have an ad of similar stupidity running where I live, though it’s about teacher’s unions being evil.
I just can’t stand the political ads this year. I don’t know if they’re really worse or it’s just me. So…what little TV I watch I record to watch later, and then just skip the ads. Might not work for everyone, but it saves a lot of wear and tear on my nerves, and prevents any number of blood pressure spikes.
Did anyone get the sense that the woman in the ad was a 1960s housewife who somehow got transported to 2012? The faux Brady Bunch wholesomeness was pretty strong. I just get the feeling of someone who laces their neighbor’s coffee with arsenic if their lawn gets too tall.
Ah – the neo-Carol Brady. Good choice.
Noadi – :).
Becuz Obummer is gonna to force you to marry another man! !1!
Yeah, I am totally for redefining marriage so that my relationship would count.
Isn’t it inane to say they ‘don’t want the people to decide’ as a shill for the party that actually goes further to suppress voters?
People need to get into their heads that you don’t have to get married in a church. Some don’t even know that! Civil and religious marriage are two different things and you can have one without the other.
Ah, yes.
“Let the majority decide”, a kid’s version of democracy, so if the majority decides that the minority isn’t worth shit everything is fine.
Why can’t we redefine marriage? Why is that a bad thing?
That’s a good start.
The people do decide, and they don’t need to be given special rights for this.
The religious right have lost this argument, and they know it.
I know, I’m stuck watching Linda McMahon every day as she tells me how wholesome the spew of pro-wrestling has been & how it has enriched society.
Giliell:
I believe the $10 poli sci 101 term for this is “the tryanny of the majority”.
I had the misfortune of being in a tour group with one of these zealots recently.
She was a spindly type, with a very Michele Bachmann-like manner;overwhelmingly condescending and smiley while spewing the vilest, bigoted shit.
Suffice to say, the source of the problem, and what she kept retreating to, was that she felt that she “owned” the concept of marriage and if those gays wanted something like it, they should call it something else.
Oh yeah, and if they don’t like it, they should move somewhere else and that’s why we had a civil war, and our freedom of speech is being suppressed, yadda, yadda.
I’d say it’d be a waste of time to explain to try and explain that not all marriage requires religion (as steve84 noted). This person understood that but didn’t care about the inherent seperate-but-equal problem.
What seemed to work, instead, was explaining that:
1) marriage existed before any religious institution claimed it
2) claiming marriage based on your own religious persuasion ignores religions that are fine or sorta fine with marriage for gay people (eg the majority of Catholic leaty don’t support a ban).
3) you simply can’t claim a concept or an institution. If you tell a couple they can only have “civil union”, would that stop them sending invites to their “marriage”? The horror!
4) you can’t escape charges of your actions being bigotry and anti-freedom just because you re-label your efforts.
The last one seemed to be killer: they want to appear nice and just having a debate, but don’t want to fess up to their reasons for their actions.
“Ratings have been disabled for this video.” Gee, I wonder why?
Damn, she won me over when she lifted the mug at “voters will have lost their say”.
Tyranny of the majority anyone? Anyone?
I lived in Michigan during that anti-marriage amendment, and I now live in Minnesota. Minnesota’s crew against the amendment are very visible and organized here.
A post in my blog about the issue.
Picture mentioning atheist support.
It’s interesting that they are making this argument when so many of them say, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner.”
All the other times marriage was “redefined” (from polygamy-is-fine, the-woman-is-property, marriage-is-chiefly-an-economic-arrangement) don’t count. It’s this one last change that will spell the end of marriage.
I truly believe* the colored should have their voices heard. But calling it a “vote”? That’s just going after the history and social significance of the word, it would be tantamount to rewriting history. I have no objection for it to be called “negro opinion”, for example, or “black’s favorite”; but “vote” really should not be sacrificed as a term and twisted in that way just for the political purposes of some powerful legislators.
(*not really!)
We have one here in MI that flatly states a vote in favor of protecting collective bargaining will result in it being illegal to fire sex abusers from schools and day-care facilities.
Marriage is one of the many things in which humans mistake the symbol for the thing its meant to represent. To me, it seems to be a perceptual flaw, present in almost every human endeavor. What is marriage, really, but a symbol of two people’s commitment to one another? While I believe that the commitment is the important thing, I also believe that people have the right to utilize whatever symbol they wish to mark it.
“I just get the feeling of someone who laces their neighbor’s coffee with arsenic if their lawn gets too tall.”
You win one internet! Fabulous! I might have to steal that one…I’ve known several people like that…
By the way, my country redefined marriage in 2005.
Our civil code used to say: Man and woman have the right to marry according to the dispositions of this Code.
Now it says: Man and woman have the right to marry according to the dispositions of this Code. Marriage will have the same requirements and effects when both contracting parties are of the same or different sex.
Simple as that. As far as I know, God hasn’t sent any earthquakes or plagues our way… YET.
Ah, that’s why I’m glad to be Australian. Except we’ve got Pell. And Abbott. Oh, and some nutter who thinks bananas are divinely designed. And several (well publicised, there must be thousands other) nutters who think they’re christ(I hate that autocorrect wants to capitalise that). Rats. We’re all screwed.
Well, he has never been known for his good aim.
Their final trick down here in North Carolina last May was to run statewide a full page picture of the Rt. Rev. Billy Frank Graham (native son, though his operation used to be up there in Minneapolis, Minn.) with the “message”: (snip) “The Bible is clear — God’s definition of marriage is between a man and a woman. (snip) God bless you as you vote, (signed) Billy Graham”
Of course, God’s Word passed 60 to 40 statewide … but failed in the larger cities where more affluent, progressive, educated (all locations of institutions of higher learning) voters live.
Majority supporters of the “One Penis–One Vagina” Amendment were Baptist and Catholic churches.
Go figure …
Isn’t this usually the time when her husband gets caught having gay sex in a public toilet and has to resign to spend more time with his family?
Oh, joy.
This is the kind of shit I can expect on my TV here in WA for the next couple of months? I may not be in any hurry to get my Dish turned back on (damn poverty). The kids watch Netflix most of the time anyway.
I would miss out on the times my son says something really cool though when he has seen or heard something disagreeable. The last time was when I was reading some article or another regarding anti-feminist women and he asked what I was reading about- that some women believe that they are, indeed, inferior to men or unqualified for certain types of professions. His response? “But then they are being sexist against themselves.”
Amazing how a 13 year old can grasp things so much better than many alleged “adults”.
Hay look at that…they’re fans of Minnesota Atheists TV Show.
Our mute button gets quite a workout this time of year.
Kind of makes me sad that I live in NY. I mean, we’re not a “battleground” state, so I don’t get any of the really good presidential ads and since we don’t allow for ballot initiatives (thank fucking goodness), we don’t get the full force of the right wing fear monger machine.
And, you know, we’ve already had marriage equality for a year now and everyone seems to have shut up about it*.
*There is a least one court challenge (arguing that the marriage equality vote in the state lege ran afoul of the open meetings law), but that seems to have stalled.
Audley, you do have New York senator, Rubén Díaz. You are a lucky person.
I moved from New York to PA recently and am astonished by the change in campaigning intensity. Also a little sad. The voter registration drive’s ads say “your vote counts more in Pennsylvania”. Shouldn’t everyone’s vote count equally in a democracy? Yeah, I know. It’s not a democracy and never has been. This republic stuff…I’m not so sure about it.
Neo-Carol Brady, or neo-Stepford Wife ?
Is your wife on the right pills ?
On this first Monday in October, I have only one thing to say about the “this will damage my marriage” argument:
An eyeblink ago in geologic time, “all other persons” were defined as 3/5 of white male voters… and couldn’t vote at all. First we decided that they are at least whole persons. Then we decided that they are whole voters (presuming that they have government-issued IDs, but that’s a slightly separate issue). During roughly the same period, we decided that a Y chromosome was not a prerequisite for either personhood or voterhood.
My status as a voter is not impaired by a more-inclusive body politic. In fact, it is enhanced (and oh, if only the non-Caucasian aspects of my ancestry were at issue…). Then there’s the issue that one of the participants in Wednesday’s upcoming farcical debate couldn’t have been on stage. At all.
Now, since “redefining persons” has not even arguably damaged either this nation or its society — a far more fundamental change — please explain to me how “redefining marriage” does… especially since the argument on “redefining marriage” is directed to political participants.
Oh Janine. We’ve got a bunch of weirdos like Díaz in our state government, which is why Gov Cuomo had to get a handful of Republicans on his side before the marriage equality vote*. NY politics is nothing if not absurd.
*Which has cost at least one (Roy MacDonald) his seat.
Try Illinois politics for the theater of the absurd. There is always a good chance for a standing Illinois governor to end up in prison. Blago was hardly the first one.
Oh Blago.
I will admit, we’re not nearly as corrupt as Illinois*, but we are goddamned silly.
*Pedro Espada aside.
I can see that her argument is weak, well actually it’s just plain dumb, but on the other hand, she’s very pretty and maternal looking and she has marvelous diction. Oh gosh, I just don’t know what to believe…
Letting the voters decide? Hell, the average American voter doesn’t. Half of the rest are below average. And considering that some elections are decided by whether it’s raining on Election Day, the voters are the last people I want to decide this.
Of course, the other way that doesn’t fly is that allowing same-sex marriage is giving people the right to decide in an individual, case-by-case basis. The only restriction is that each person only gets to decide for their own marriage, not other people’s – and I’ve yet to hear any convincing argument as to how or why anyone else’s marriage is my business.
The only people that should be allowed to vote for marriage redefinition laws are those people that it will affect, gays and lesbians in this case. Let’s let them decide if they want equal rights. Proposed legislation such as this should be decided by rule of law, not by majority rule.
LOL, sorry I could not watch the video as all I saw was Lenore, Mr Universe’s wife from the movie Serenity.
Referendum victory is the third-best outcome.
(Legislative is second, judicial is first — it’s not a new law that way, only an acknowledgement of what the law has been, and should have been, the whole time)
Democracy isn’t designed to lead to the best outcome, and it doesn’t. It leads to the most popular outcome, though there are all sorts of fascinating-to-me arguments about what “most popular” means. When you need the best outcome, take the decision out of the hands of the people.
I knew this woman. I worked with her at a summer camp when she was nineteen (in the 1980s, not the 1960s). She was Kalley Baker then, and I would never had predicted this future for her. She was smart, fun, and seemed decent enough.
Years later, after I had long since lost touch with her, she was Kalley King, a news anchor on the Minneapolis CBS affiliate, WCCO. She’s a trained professional in TV work.
This makes me sad. Not just that someone I once had a friendship with would be a voice for something so wrong (which is, of course, bad enough) but that she would use such stupid arguments. I see that she is the ‘host’ of ‘Minnesota Marriage Minute’, and there are apparently lots of other videos with her spouting other arguments for injustice. I had a hard enough time watching this one. I won’t be watching any more.
What is the current definition of marriage, anyhow? Where is it written down, who decided what it is, and were the people involved in that definition?
Or are these bozos currently defining it by pretending it’s one-man-one-woman?
All I hear is this, and sometimes I just wish they would be forthright about their biogtry and say it:
“If we redefine marriage so that it no longer discriminates against same-sex couples, then straight couples will no longer be legally recognized as special and superior to those blasphemous perverts.”
#24, I understand that you are making a philosophical point, but this issue is about more than just philosophy. Civil marriage comes with several rights and responsibilities that I, as a gay man, don’t get to enjoy with my partner. It affects the taxes we pay, hospital visitation and medical decisions and social security benefits to name but a few. So marriage is more than just a symbol.
1) Electoral college! Yaaaaaaay.
2) Why the fuck do people insist that Pennsylvania is a swing state? Maybe it actually was 20 years ago? Nowadays, North Carolina is a swing state.
Don’t confuse democracy with direct democracy. The USA is supposed to be a representative democracy, like most countries these days.
“Republic” just means “not a monarchy”.
I remember the same wimpy “teh gheys are redefining marriage” and “your vote will be taken away” talking points pushed non stop 4 years ago by the California Prop. 8 campaign. Luckily a federal court shut down P8 a few years later.