Better free your mind instead

In another "Look a pterodactyl" move, president Bush used his weekly radio address for some quality gay bashing.

"Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society," Bush said in his Saturday radio address. "Marriage cannot be cut off from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening this good influence on society."

Actually, ages of experience have taught us that straight marriages and breeding result in divorce and abandonment of partners and children. Straight marriages frequently involve physical and emotional abuse perpetrated by the spouses on each other and on the children. This abuse takes the form of sexual assault and enslavement, severe physical trauma, neglect, starvation, torture, and sometimes even death.

How's that for using convention and fallacy to make nifty generalizations?

So Bush supports amending the US Constitution to make discrimination legal. If we were going to get all excited about an amendment, here's one that's been kicking around for over 80 years which seems like a much more noble and civilized modification of the Constitution.
That's right. It's the Equal Rights Amendment.

Here's the text of the highly controversial ERA:
from equalrightsamendment.org
Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

More about the ERA:
from equalrightsamendment.org
...By June 30, 1982, the ERA had been ratified by 35 states, leaving it three states short of the 38 required for ratification. It has been reintroduced into every Congress since that time.

Who hasn't ratified it? Big surprise, states which are part of what I refer to as "the cracker barrel" (for several (1, 2) reasons).

Map 1 - States which haven't ratified the ERA:


I thought this was an interesting comparison. Map 2 is of free states vs. slave states.


Map 3 would be the states which would support an amendment to the US Constitution banning gay marriage. Presumably, that could be derived by looking at which states ban gay marriage right now. But state level bans and rights are not at all easy to track because this issue is in a high level of flux in the states right now. A run down in 2004 reported that 39 states had some sort of prohibition of gay marriage, a spread that is all over the damned place. It seems allowing everyone the opportunity to fuck up and get married is a really scarey concept for a whole lot of people. Some of these state level bans have been challenged, some states not in that original 39 are dealing with court challenges and proposed legislation prohibiting or allowing gay marriage. In keeping with the Map 1 and Map 2 set, of the 11 states which passed constitutional amendments banning gay marriage in 2004, many came out of the cracker barrel. A couple that didn't had far narrower margins in the votes. But this is pretty discouraging nonetheless.

The "Eeek Gays!" strategy worked so well in the 2004 presidential election that Bush, as GOP cheerleader, is using it again to play to "his people" - the crackers - in the lead up to the congressional elections. I really hope sanity and reason can prevail in the upcoming legislative elections, but considering the quite mild ERA couldn't get 38 states in 80 years, I feel a little uneasy believing the average US citizen will be immune to this current policy of pandering to prejudice.