Posted on 06/15/2007 6:48:29 AM PDT by Andy'smom
THOSE OF US who have lived with the Bay State's marriage war for years can lose sight of how extreme we appear to much of the rest of the country.
This afternoon, the Legislature shot down the proposed constitutional amendment that would have banned same-sex marriage. A few minutes after the vote, I was on the air discussing it with Dennis Prager, a nationally syndicated radio host based in Los Angeles. Citizen initiatives and referendums are nothing new to Californians, who vote on ballot issues all the time, but Prager wanted me to shed some light on the convoluted process a citizen-proposed constitutional amendment in Massachusetts must go through before it reaches the voters.
So I explained that even though 170,000 Bay State voters had signed petitions to put a marriage amendment on the ballot, it first had to undergo a vote in two consecutive sessions of the Legislature, and win support from at least 25 percent of the lawmakers each time. Since it had failed to do that, the amendment was now dead.
Prager wasn't sure he'd heard me right. Are you telling me, he asked in disbelief, that fewer than one in four Massachusetts legislators thinks marriage should be defined as the union of a man and a woman? Yes, I told him; the vote to kill the amendment was 151 to 45. ''Incredible,'' said Prager.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
First of all, it's pretty clear we shouldn't let any Massachusetts politicians near the children. After that, best they stay in their own neighborhoods ~ and that's not here.
The 49 sane states should quarantine MA so this AIDS-promoting virus doesn’t affect the rest of the body politic.
Afterward, he tried to get the same court to stop it, then sued the Senate in the same court to force them to vote. Ineffective and symbolic, but at least it looks like he tried.
The funny thing is how Democrats will go to any extreme to stifle democracy.
I was in Houston a few weeks ago and the discussion of Romney came up. The locals thought that there were 2 M’s he had to overcome. The Mormon factor he could overcome but the bigger obstacle was “Massachusetts”. That is Romney’s biggest problem and he has to distance himself from this communist state. If he loses the nomination I am convinced it will because of the MA tag. MA makes even California look moderate, it is essentially a 1 party tyranny with no hope for a Republican ever winning state wide office ever again.
Not unlike the situation in Congress on the Immigration fiasco: Americans don’t want it, but Congress will pass the legislation in spite of U.S. Citizens’ wishes....people don’t matter anymore; the politicians live for contributions from corporate interests, and get re-elected anyway.
Well he sure has gone to great lengths to distance himself, hasn’t he?
He absolutely has to stand any chance in the South.
When I visit Texas / NC for business, I always have to spend the first 15 minutes convincing the folks I am dealing with that I am not a Kennedy liberal and am a sane person that just happens to live in MA. If you are from Massachusetts today, you are guilty unless proven otherwise. That reputation is well deserved BTW as the majority of voters in this state keep re-electing left wing communist elitists like Kerry / Kennedy / Deval.
I am proud to be an American but absolutely embarrassed to be from Massachusetts.
But he was just Governor there a year ago, right? Has it changed that much and unalterably in that short a time?
He was the governor SIX MONTHS ago.
You combine all these trends and MA is a lost cause for the GOP forever.
The only good news is that due to people moving out of state, MA will lose 1-2 seats in congress by 2010.
That is a very valid statement and Romney’s biggest challenge. I believe that Romney is conservative on most issues and is not representative of mainstream Massachusetts views. However perception is reality and your statement may be the reason that he loses the nomination.
However if MA is bad, then being the mayor of NYC has to be worse. NYC is even more radical than Massachusetts.
How did he get elected governor in the first place?
However if MA is bad, then being the mayor of NYC has to be worse. NYC is even more radical than Massachusetts.
I don't know which place is worse, but my original statement applies to NYC as well, and disqualifies Rudy.
When Mitt was Governer, he took *some* steps towards helping the process along, but not enough, IMO.
I heard Gov Patrick on WBZ this morning. He said that this issue “distracted us from real issues like job creation, affordable housing and health care.” Ugh. Then he said that the issue has been losing steam and that the voters don’t care about it as much now as they used to. I hope he’s really happy with himself — bought and sold by the pink hand like the cheap political whore that he is.
“Same-sex marriage will be the law of the land.”
No it won’t.
“How did he get elected governor in the first place?”
Our last few Governers have been Republican. It seems the voters here in MA have never been able to accept a COMPLETELY Democrat-ruled Commonwealth ..... until 2006.
“Prager wasn’t sure he’d heard me right. Are you telling me, he asked in disbelief, that fewer than one in four Massachusetts legislators thinks marriage should be defined as the union of a man and a woman? Yes, I told him; the vote to kill the amendment was 151 to 45. ‘’Incredible,’’ said Prager.”
One in four *legislators* not registered voters.
FFS, Nancy Pelosi was calling MA stage legislators asking them to kill this proposed amendment.
Clearly, it's hurting the Romney campaign for the nomination. But I don't think it will hurt him in a general election.
While the vast majority of liberals in the US would never vote for Romney anyway, they're not important in the end game. Conservatives would swallow hard and vote for Romney (except those who are hardcore deadset against him) so the election comes down, like it always does, to the mushy middle.
Folks in that mushy middle who are uncomfortable with gay marriage, and might tend to hold Mitt responsible for it (believe me, he's already written speeches needed to calm most of them down) will probably take a it-can't-happen-here attitude. That will be a direct result of the spate of state Constitutional amendments that have defined marriage as one man, one woman.
As Jacoby points out, only a Federal amendment can keep this from happening. With a Democrat controlled Congress, that will never happen. With any more than a quarter of the states being "blue" states that would never ratify such an amendment, the chances of even a Republican Congress making such an amendment law is also pretty much nonexistant.
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