You know how it works — politicians put out the bad stuff on Friday so that people won’t notice until it’s too late. Well, guess what happened yesterday?
Yup, that old constitutional amendment is back, only this time it’s been renamed “Defense of Marriage Amendment.” And it’s been reintroduced by a California Republican, Dan Lungren — dammit, just as I was getting excited about moving away from backwards Virginia to progressive California.
Now, get this:
The measure was reintroduced four days after a California judge ruled that barring same-sex couples from equal marriage rights violates the state constitution. Lungren called superior judge Richard Kramer’s call for equal treatment for all Californians “an act of lawlessness” and said that marriage discrimination needed to be written into the U.S. Constitution because “the courts aren’t democratic institutions.”
Ugh. I love the idea of a lawmaker calling equal treatment “lawlessness.” And yes, the courts are undemocratic. That’s the point: to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.
According to the Advocate, this rewritten amendment is worse than ever, forbidding even domestic partnerships.
Why, oh why, do these politicians feel that they must demonize an entire group of American citizens? Where exactly is the difference between these rabid right-wingers and the segregationists, the Nazis, and every other evil group in history who decided that people were a problem?
