I’d really like to thank Joe Budzinski for the relatively civil tone of the recent discussion over at Nova Town Hall (this astonishing statement aside) and for tonight’s town hall meeting where Ann Hull provided him and other conservatives with all the reason they need to make the right decision and vote NO on the marriage prohibition amendment this November.
Ann Hull said:
A contract between two individuals is only limited by your creativity!
Well, that may be the case, but what if you’re not very creative? What if you are an unmarried individual with a significant other who finds marriage to be a pretty good model. If together you create a “legal status”¦that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effects of marriage”, you’re put into a position where the more closely your contract approximates covenant marriage, the more that contract runs afoul of the amendment language which prohibits recognition of that status.
“Leave me alone” conservatives should understand. If two adult individuals certify that they will be faithful to each other, share property, care for each other, and be a couple until death do they part, why on earth would anybody with a heart want to say no, or worse yet, require the state to intervene in their most highly valued personal contract?
So Joe, that’s the answer to your challenge.
I have also said I’m willing to drop my support for it if the harm the Amendment would cause to those opposing it is shown to be more significant than the positive things I believe the Amendment would accomplish.
You do see the harm that the amendment causes, and the terribly Kafkesque precedent it sets? Don’t you?
I’m still working it out, as is being discussed over at NOVA TownHall. When I get it finished, you guys can copy it over here and hammer away at it, and I promise to take your responses seriously.
It was good to see Jonathan return the favor and attend our meeting; this one unfortunately presented almost zero crossover with the Marriage Amendment debate. It’s like I’m suddenly the spokesman for the Highway Patrol and the Den Mothers. I get roped into this stuff for meetings, but I’m definitely not the main guy for everything.
To save you some opposition research: The people who are lined up against illegal immigration are a different constituency. I can’t emphasize that strongly enough. At our get togethers afterwards the Marriage Amendment is not addressed because it would be like talking stamp collecting after a rugby game. For all I know, half the people on our side on the one are on the other side on the other. You’re not going to see much about gay marriage on HelpSaveLoudoun.com.
There are other people who really do represent the front line in the campaign for the Marriage Amendment. Keep watching our blog for that, and not only me.
Thanks, Joe. Looking forward to reading it.
It fascinates me that the demonizing rhetoric employed by speakers during the Herndon public meetings to refer to the day laborers was almost identical to the demonizing rhetoric used about gay people in Loudoun during the school play policy hearings. You could literally, in some cases, just substitute the word “gay” for “immigrant.” I wonder what it means that there is no crossover between those groups.
That’s interesting; I wasn’t part of either but I think I know what you mean. I’m not an expert in the stuff, but I wonder if it has something to do with the structure of ideological (or maybe “categorical”) thinking. If someone is going to make an argument based on the notion that their “world” is facing some threat brought on by “other people,” it seems reasonable to assume the foreboding language, the types of categorizations employed, assumptions about the degree of scheming and hidden alliances attributed to the other side – conspiratorial thinking, might all be very similar regardless of which aspect of the “world” and which “other people” are involved in any given conflict.
It might be interesting to take two pieces of ideological writing on the gay marriage issue, one by a really hard core right wing Christian thinker with a bent toward conspiratorial thinking – Tim LaHaye comes to mind, and one by a super-extreme person on the left – someone who considers the NY Times a right-wing mouthpiece and believes all marriage and age of consent restrictions should be abolished – with a bent toward conspiratorial thinking (sorry, I can’t suggest an example because I run with the other gang of freaks), and compare the method and structure of their arguments.
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Joe, these are really good points. There does seem to be a “type” that tends toward rigid, categorical thinking and feels threatened by ambiguity of any kind. I don’t know what the answer is for that, other than we all need to chill and remember that we are all just human beings with a powerful drive to protect our families. We have to figure out how to find reconciliation and coexist in the world.
I can’t really come up with an example of anything that extreme. I try to avoid gangs of freaks in general 🙂