A political grenade

The Boston Globe ^ | 06/15/2007 | Jeff Jacoby

[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.

[hunter112]

“Same-sex marriage will be the law of the land.”

No it won’t.

We're one Supreme Court decision away from making it so. While Massachusetts has so far refused to marry any out-of-state homosexual couples, we haven't had (to my knowledge) a case of a MA couple getting legally married in that state, then moving to another state, where they will demand that their marriage be recognized under FF&C. When that case gets to the SCOTUS, then the ball game is over.

[Maneesh]

“How did he get elected governor in the first place?”

The voters in MA had some level of sanity left until 2006. They wanted at some semblance of fiscal conservativeness left which is why they elected a Republican Governor. Now a Republican in MA (other than Romney) is strictly a RINO and a clone of Arnold. They were socially liberal and fiscally on the middle. However even that check and balance has gone and it is in your face full fledged liberalism because they have no fear of losing any election ever again.

The GOP has given up in this state and no good candidate will subject themselves to the futility of running as a Republican. The winner of the democrat primary is the default winner of the general election.

[Andy'smom]

“While Massachusetts has so far refused to marry any out-of-state homosexual couples,”

Rhode Island gay couples are getting married here because their attorney general gave the okay. Rhode Island has no marriage protection law so that state will be the next to fall, no doubt.

[hunter112]

That’s an individual state making a decision to accept another state’s procedure. That can always be reversed by a different leadership in that particular state. A Supreme Court decision striking down a state Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage would strike down all such state bans.