ne thing you can’t deny about gay marriage advocates in California: They are relentless. Even before the California Supreme Court issues its ruling on Prop 8 following hearings two weeks ago the homosexual lobby is at it again:
SACRAMENTO — The sponsors of a second ballot measure seeking to repeal California’s ban on same-sex marriage have been cleared to start collecting signatures.
The secretary of state on Friday gave the group Yes on Equality until August 17 to collect the nearly 700,000 signatures needed to qualify its initiative for the 2010 ballot.
If approved by voters, the group’s proposed constitutional amendment would rescind Proposition 8, which passed last November. The California Supreme Court is expected to rule any time on legal challenges to the voter-approved measure. (LA Times)
You could see this one coming. The gay marriage movement picked up considerable momentum between the state’s two successful sanctity of marriage initiatives, Prop 22, which passed by 61.4 percent in 2000 and Prop 8, which passed by 52.5 percent in 2008. But they are taking a risk of voter backlash. They’ve lost twice, and if the SCOCA rules Prop 8 is constitutional, the momentum very likely could turn toward the sanctity of marriage.
.S. District Judge Morrison C. England Jr. curtly rejected a frantic attempt by supporters of Prop. 8 - California’s marriage protection initiative - to keep late donor names separate, saying dismissively:
“The court finds that the state is not facilitating retaliation by compelling disclosure.” (source)
Interesting finding, with “interesting” being polite for “lame, ridiculous, unintelligible.” While California law is straightforward, stating that disclosure is required, Prop. 8 supporters made a compelling argument for privacy protection - you know the protection they give women who want to kill their pre-borns - claiming donors have been ravaged by hateful and threatening e-mails and phone calls, confrontations, and even death threats.
Now the judge could have ruled that the California Political Reform Act requires disclosure of contributors of more than $100 and the Prop 8 donors failed to make a compelling case for not enforcing it, but instead he said the state “is not facilitating retaliation by compelling disclosure.”
On what planet? Prop 8 supporters aren’t going around in Yes on Prop 8 T-shirts, bating violent straightophobes who want to punch someone out for supporting traditional marriage, so how else will the No on 8 die-hards find victims?
Does England really think putting the names of contributors into the hands of people who have done plenty to prove their capabilities in thuggery and harrassment will have no consequences? He must be a liberal intellectual, because only a liberal intellectual could be that dense.
ere’s the non-news of the day: Hollywood celebs are plowing dough into the No on 8 campaign, happily supporting the concept that a tiny court of non-elected poobahs can willy-nilly strip away the will of the people. (Prop 8, the second most important vote in America on Nov. 4, seeks a Cal. constitutional amendment limiting marriage to the union of one man and one woman, after the Cal Supremes overturned a previous proposition.)
SacBee’s Capitol Alert reports that the tinsel/glitter set is engaged like a couple horny guys in a bathhouse:
Ron Burkle, the playboy billionaire, is hosting a No on 8 fundraiser tonight at his Bev Hills home, with musical guests Melissa Etheridge and Mary J. Bilge. It’ll cost you $1,000 to get in the door, but Ron wants you to fork over $250,000 to become a No on 8 “champion.”
Last week Steve “It’s not my baby” Bing pledged $500,000 in matching funds. If Steve-arino would just settle down into a nice gay marriage union, he wouldn’t have to worry about future paternity suits.
Recently wed to her girlfriend, Ellen DeGeneres has purchased $100,000 in air time, presumably to throw her good will at this bad cause. Brad Pitt and Stephen Spielberg have also tossed about an hour’s salary, $100,000, into the pot.
I recommend the Yes on 8 forces immediately begin producing a TV spot highlighting all these people, their money, their skewered morality (in most cases), and their efforts to sway the vote.
Still, as of today, Prop 9 is enjoying a 9% lead in the polls. And remember this: California’s black population, which is strongly conservative on this issue, is expected to turn out in force for Obama. Count on a strong majority of them to vote “yes” on 9.
roposition 8 on the California ballot in November seeks to protect the voice of 61 percent of the California people who voted in 2000 for Proposition 22, saying that marriage would remain the realm solely of a man and a woman and that all the possible gay, lesbian, transexual and God knows what else variations would not be deemed “marriages” by the state.
The pro-gay marriage groups know that if Prop 8 passes, gay marriage in California isn’t just ‘mostly dead,’ it’s dead dead, and they are fighting a much smarter fight this time. Let California Ring, a “no on 8″ committee, started the campaign with this ad:
It’s a brilliant piece of work because it avoids all the problems the gays had last time around by not showing a single gay person. Rather, it calls on straights to empathize with the heartbreak and frustration gay couples feel being denied marriage. There are some legal issues with the ad because it doesn’t identify itself as a political ad, but they’re a subtext to the theme.
A very high bar has been set for pro-8 groups by the wedding ad. They will have to explain just as compellingly why the nice gay couple shouldn’t be allowed to walk down the aisle, and hate and fear won’t work well as motivators, given the compassionate themes laid down by Let California Ring. Here’s how Protect Marriage - Yes On 8 tries to get people to vote for the proposition:
The Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage did not just overturn the will of California voters; it also redefined marriage for the rest of society, without ever asking the people themselves to accept this decision. This decision has far-reaching consequences. For example, because public schools are already required to teach the role of marriage in society as part of the curriculum, schools will now be required to teach students that gay marriage is the same as traditional marriage, starting with kindergarteners. By saying that a marriage is between “any two persons” rather than between a man and a woman, the Court decision has opened the door to any kind of “marriage.” This undermines the value of marriage altogether at a time when we should be restoring marriage, not undermining it.
My voting-age daughters, who are conservative on most issues, have trouble seeing what’s wrong with undermining marriage because their social influences have included much of the “post gay being controversial” worldview that permeates popular culture. The only argument that gains any traction with them is the historical one: No societies ever have done this, so we need to ask why, we need to consider it very carefully. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they both vote no.
It’s going to be particularly difficult for the Yes on 8 set now that No on 8 has this:
The American Civil Liberties Union reported donating $1.2 million to defeat Proposition 8, the ban on gay marriage, on the November ballot.
The $1.2 million donation is the single largest check written to the campaign, though Equality California, a gay-rights group, and the Human Rights Campaign, a similar group, have bundled more total donations. (SacBee)
I can’t tell by the way it’s written whether both Equality California and the Human Rights Campaign have bundled more than $1.2 million, or more than $2.4 million combined, or whether together they’ve bundled more than $1.2 million. Either way, No on 8 has quite a war chest, especially when you consider that the funding for Let California Ring is separate.
On the other side, Yes on 8 is being waged primarily by a religious coalition of Mormons, Catholics and Evangelicals who are working to get Hindus, Jews, Muslims and others on board. They plan later this month to hand out over one million “Yes on 8″ yard signs as their major campaign push. They have a lot of heart:
“This is a rising up over a 5,000-year-old institution that is being hammered right now,” said Jim Garlow, pastor of Skyline Church, an evangelical congregation in La Mesa. Garlow said that, while he supported Proposition 22, he was not nearly as involved as this time around, when he has helped organize 3,400-person conference calls across denominations to coordinate campaign support for the proposed constitutional amendment.
“What binds us together is one common obsession: . . . marriage,” Garlow said.
He added that many people of faith, regardless of their religion, believe that “if Proposition 8 fails, there is an inevitable loss of religious freedom.” (LA Times)
But faith and yardsigns aren’t much more than a few fish and loaves in a basket, when compared to the multitudes of dollars and years of chipping away at the issue that are on the other side.
The Obama administration told us that not only would they be very good at spending unfathomable sums of money, but they’d also be maestros at turning that cash into jobs for a job-hungry America. Like so many White House words, the Big Job Promise is turning out to be nothing more than hype-fuel for the big-government machine.
Take the $3.3 billion grant program to upgrade the nation’s electricity network. Please. When it was announced in April by Joe “Oh, It’s Just A Little Lie” Biden, he had a pretty simple - if grammatically challenged - explanation for the grant’s intent: “This is jobs - jobs.”
[T]he Obama administration is now saying it will not take the potential for job creation into account in “rating” proposed projects for possible funding — after initially saying that would be a primary consideration.
In April, when the Energy Department first announced regulations for companies that wish to apply for “Smart Grid Investment Grants,” “job creation and retention” was among the explicit criteria. …
But late last month, the department quietly modified the criteria to take the job piece out. As the department explained in a June 26 set of Frequently Asked Questions:
“These criteria differ significantly from those presented within the [Notice of Intent]. First, DOE removed the criterion on the extent of jobs creation ….”
Good governance mandates that return on investment should be the criteria for selecting these projects, not jobs, so I’m not disappointed in DOE’s new direction. But I am just a wee bit disappointed that the White House has become such a den of hyperbole and deceit.
With Obama winning the presidency by seven percent, we can't blame the media. Their laudatory coverage and refusal to extensively probe into Obama's background and [lack of] experience was at best responsible for five percent of his vote, the pundits tell us. Here is a compilation of over 100 significant instances of pro-Obama/anti-McCain bias during the 2008 campaign.
"Thank you for the Voice of the Victims films. The students really liked it, and it means so much to them to hear real stories and not watch a cheesy drama like so many other videos."
— a high school teacher.
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Ron Burkle
My voting-age daughters, who are conservative on most issues, have trouble seeing what’s wrong with undermining marriage because their social influences have included much of the “post gay being controversial” worldview that permeates popular culture. The only argument that gains any traction with them is the historical one: No societies ever have done this, so we need to ask why, we need to consider it very carefully. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they both vote no.
Take the $3.3 billion grant program to upgrade the nation’s electricity network. Please. When it was announced in April by Joe “Oh, It’s Just A Little Lie” Biden, he had a pretty simple - if grammatically challenged - explanation for the grant’s intent: “This is jobs - jobs.”