Yea, I know it seems about as likely as snow in the Sahara, but people are worried enough about it that they’ve got an Amendment on the ballot this year just like Virginia.
Glenn Reynolds isn’t happy about the idea:
I’m going to try to figure out what I can do to oppose this measure, though it’s a tricky political calculus as drawing attention to it may actually help its passage, since a failure to vote on the measure at all is tantamount to a “no” vote. I suspect, though, that the anti-gay-marriage forces will make enough noise to ensure that it’s not ignored.
My own sense is that this sort of thing belongs in the political sphere, and that efforts to insulate it from the political sphere, either by judicial fiat or constitutional amendment, are a bad idea.
I can’t say I disagree.
I can’t say that I disagree, either, if only because a legislative enactment of equality is harder to spin as “fiat” bu “activist judges.” Not that the authoritarians behind this sort of nonsense don’t try: In California, where the legislature is enacting various pro-equality measures, nutjobs like James Dobson are actually sending out letters railing against “legislative activists.”
These folks just want to get their way. It doesn’t matter how they get it, or whether it actually represents the will of the people. I don’t know what the polling numbers look like in Tennessee, but in Virginia it turns out that 59% of the voters support civil unions, higher than the national average. The problem is getting them to take two minutes to actually read the language of the amendment. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask, but we do need to ask, so:
Before you vote, read the entirety of the thing you are voting on.
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