This can't come as a surprise, given the history of the political pressure that has come from the pulpit over the course of Euro occupation of North America. During the latter half of the 1800's churches and their missionary zealots, controlled the BIA and lobbyied for both Federal and State laws to restrict indigenous behaviors of all sorts. Many of those laws still are on the books and occassionally used on or near reservations. Such actions today are becoming all the more frequent, as in Indiana's new legislation regarding non-intercourse pregnancies.

I try to keep in mind that the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice (to paraphrase Dr. King), and that things are moving forward. I've given up trying to understand the motivation for "protecting" marriage, especially as practiced by people who have been multiple-times divorced but who spit on long-standing relationships of other people.

I can see your point. Why would we protect marriage with all the divorce in the world? Well, I guess the meaning behind marriage has no meaning. However, if that is the case, then why are the gay zealots so hard on the issue? Gay marriage can never be accepted. Why? Marriage was designed by religion. Furthermore, if religion designed marriage, then marriage was obtained from the writings of the gospels. In those we will see the teaching of a man and a women leaving their parents to become one. Nevertheless, these facts of faith for some homosexual people still disregard this part of the gospel. Call it literature, gospel, or the bible. It is the start of the concept of marriage. In addition, for that point, a person of the same sex having government marriage license does not implement the conception of marriage as for the gospel sake. Hey, what do I know, I am just a zealot. Nevertheless, so are all who believe in something.

Ugh, this whole thing is such a stupid argument. People can holler dogma and tradition 'til their faces pop off and I, a divorced woman living unmarried with a man for the last ten years (something that was illegal a hundred years ago in Massachusetts and would have landed me in the Framingham jail), will still not see the point of legislating against gay marriage. If homosexuals want to marry, they should. If they want to adopt other people's cast-off children or go through the not exactly easy process of biologically producing their own, they should. If they want to own property together, sink down roots in a community, pay increased taxes, join the PTA and the school board and the town council, in fact get in there in our society and really commit, they should. The idea that one type of sexual congress should confer greater rights and privileges upon the participants than another is just unutterably stupid, as is the idea of the mere existence of anybody's marriage being harmful to anybody else's in any way.

That said, I'd be careful about jumping to conclusions about people on the "Know Thy Neighbor" list. Some of them might have been tricked into signing, and I don't know what is meant by "verifying" the signatures it lists, do you?

This is an excerpt from a note Marty Rouse, the Campaign Director at MassEquality sent out this week:

"Over the past week, we have received numerous reports of potentially fraudulent activity, including trickery, confusion and deception, in our opponents’ paid signature-gathering campaign. As a result, the legislature’s Joint Committee on Election Law will conduct a hearing on Tuesday, October 18.

"The most commonly reported form of deception has taken place outside grocery stores like Stop-and-Shop, Shaw's, and Market Basket.

"Shoppers are lured to a sign that asks them if they want to be able to buy wine at their grocery store. Shoppers assume (correctly) that this effort is supported by their grocery store, and sign without reading the petition. In many cases, people have been asked - after signing the wine petition - if they would support the petition to revoke equal marriage rights. In other cases, people were told they needed to sign the wine petition more than once (that is not true). And in some cases, people grew suspicious and flipped the "wine" petition over, only to find it was the marriage petition.

"All of this activity is prohibited and needs to be documented. Please email us at Report@MassEquality.org or call our hotline at 617.878.2332.

"Based on the reports we received, MassEquality registered complaints with the Massachusetts Food Association (MFA), the grocery store trade association that is sponsoring the wine petition. They told us that the petition-gatherers they hired are, by contract, only allowed to gather signatures on the wine petition. These signature-gatherers are not to be collecting any signatures on the marriage petition. If you encounter a signature-gatherer collecting signatures on both the wine petition (labeled “Petition A”) and the marriage petition (labeled “Petition K”) - or on multiple petitions that you cannot identify - please talk to the store management immediately. Store managers are supposed to immediately rectify this situation.

To help us fully document this problem, please report if you have seen signature-gathering on the marriage petition, or on multiple petitions, outside of a grocery store by the same people collecting signatures on the wine petition. Please send your report, with as much detail as possible, to Report@MassEquality.org or call our hotline at 617.878.2332.

"We have also received reports of deception and confusion outside discount stores such as Wal-Mart and Target. These stores are not sponsors of the wine petition and have less control over the signature-gatherers outside. If you experience deception taking place outside these stores (or anywhere else), please complain to the manager of the store. In addition, if you see signature-gathering taking place, we encourage you to stand near the signature-collector to observe whether they are using deceptive techniques to get people to sign the marriage petition (labeled “Petition K”). You should not harass the signature-collector. However, given the reports of fraud and the importance of documenting them, it is certainly within your right to observe closely, ensure no deceptive practices are taking place, and complain to the store if they are. Again, please contact us if you witness any such incidents and provide as many specific details as possible....

"Finally, if you think you may have inadvertently signed the marriage petition, you do have recourse. To learn more, [go to] http://www.massequality.org/action/petition/inadvertent.htm."

While you're at KnowThyNeighbor.org, though, do check out the articles. This one gives another view of the signature fraud picture that we're dealing with here.

Sickening. Really.

Patrick,
If you are correct, that marriage is a religious institution, than the state shouldn't be in the marriage business at all, right? Marriage should be a church-sanctioned ceremony, with no legal benefits in order to preserve church and state separation. No one should be allowed to marry in a "legal" sense. It should all be ceremonial. And each religion can go back to practicing whatever form of marriage it prefers.
But, if we argue that marriage is a state institution that confers legal protections to the parties involved, than I'm afraid that discriminating against one class of individuals violates their constitutional rights. And equal protection under the law stipulates that you can't do that.
So, either the state gets out of the marriage business all together, or gays and straights have equal access to state-sanctioned marriage.

When the fuck will people get that marriage has always been about property and inheritance rights? When will people get that the fairy tales around wedding are exactly that, fairy tales.

I am just amazed at how people think marriage has anything to do with love or faith. I am really not being cynical about this. I am a bleeding heart romantic and for that reason did not believe marriage was the best thing for me --that was, until I got pregnant and was slapped in the face with all the legal meanderings people have to go through to secure the most basic rights to privacy as a family.

Marriage has nothing, NOTHING, to do with faith.

I have yet to hear a civilized arguement from the left on this one. Until you stop the hypocritical defamation attacks on those who don't agree with you, (almost any evangelical Christian) I'll always laugh uncomfortably at your claim that THEY are the haters.

Don't you see the double standard? At least they've got some pretty solid doctrine that states why they would oppose homosexual marriage. What do you have on your side of the arguement? Some sort of claim of "they want to, why shouldn't they be able to?" seems a very poor suggestion to me.

The entire question comes from the inability to accept the conceptof universal truth. You're so post-modern that nothing is true anymore.

I find it philosophically disheartening to hear all the anti-Christian ramblings coming from the "shining beacon of tolerance".

All I know, is that if I were take you at face value, the entire platform by which Western Society was built ought to be disregarded as bigoted and stupid. Surely you know by now that the liberation doctrine has never established a society, but often in the cases has led to the destruction of such. We should all be a little more respectful to the beams upon which this house rests. We are not some sort of generation that has all of a sudden discovered new revelations about acceeptable and beneficial behavior.

In a Democracy, a majority of people ought to have their say. Of course, I'm not going to sit out here and tell you I'm a big supporter of the concept of Democracy as a form of government...

On the other hand, Democracy is what we have. If courts ignore the procedural rules that tie our government together in order to promulgate their opinions and reason, they threaten our Democracy far more than a seemingly "old fashioned" (and straight) couple waving a sign calling for the ban of gay marriage ever could.