Yeah, yeah, Tom Oliphant likes Kerry, and he’s a Massachusetts liberal and all, but that doesn’t change the fact that, of the 11 state ballot initiatives portrayed as “protecting marriage”, only three were just about that–“the other 8 were about restricting people’s abilities to make certain sorts of contracts”:http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/11/07/the_gay_marriage_deception/:
bq. In pivotal Ohio, for example, the voters may not have realized it but they voted to strip people of the right to contractually arrange distribution of assets, child custody, pensions, and other employment benefits.
Yep, those are the sorts of things that people in long term relationships who can’t get married might want to arrange. But they’ve been explicitly denied the right to enter into those sorts of contracts.
Your “small government” party at work.
Hopefully some activist judges will strike down these laws. Presumably, it shouldn’t be too hard a sell, since apparently people didn’t bother to find out what they were voting for, and are now presumably suffering buyers remorse:
bq. The evidence is that the voters who approved it also opposed its actual contents. In the official exit poll Tuesday night, 27 percent of the voters said they support full marriage rights, 35 percent supported civil unions, and only 27 percent oppose any legal rights for same-sex couples. In other words, to underline the importance of artifice and deception in our sound-bite culture, the voters approved a measure opposed substantively by 62 percent of the very same voters.
Somehow I suspect that the local media didn’t do a great job of explaining to people what those initiatives _meant_–they just parroted the talking points of those who proposed them, and if that misrepresented the substance of the initiative, well, who’re the media to do actual, you know, _reporting_.
