Not Larry Sabato is taking predictions on the outcome of the constitutional amendment against single people.
The consensus seems to be that 1) People will vote for it to the extent that they don’t understand what it says, and 2) People will be too stupid or lazy to understand what it says, resulting in a landslide passage.
This analysis simply extrapolates the results from the 2004 election and assumes they can and will be replicated. It fails to take into account the two years that have elapsed since other states adopted almost identical amendments. Something has been growing in the petri dish of those states for two years, and it is not pretty. Ohio, Michigan and Utah are all currently embroiled in lawsuits over the scope of their amendments, with a ruling in Ohio just last Friday that unmarried victims are not eligible for protection under domestic violence law.
This is not a science project that Virginians want to see two years from now. Reliable polling data demonstrates this without a doubt, and defeating this amendment requires simply letting voters know about the amendment (most people don’t) and what the amendment itself says. This has the Some Families Foundation in hysterics:
This Sunday, while you are attending church, homosexual activists in Hampton Roads will be going door to door in neighborhoods working to undermine marriage. While you worship God, Equality Virginia, the state’s leading anti-marriage organization, will be knocking on doors trying to convince people that supporting traditional marriage is bigoted and hateful..
..While November may seem far away, the fight over how the next generation will define marriage is well underway. Make no mistake, homosexual activists are mobilized and are highly motivated to defeat marriage at the ballot on November 7. We cannot take for granted that “conservative” Virginia will follow the 19 other states that have voted in favor of marriage. [emphasis added]
Comical language usage aside, the anti-gay right is counting on their ability to fool voters with a bald-faced lie, not really the best position to be in. They are pretending that the amendment only consists of its first paragraph – but voters can see for themselves what the full text says, and that it actually takes away the ability of the legislature to allow civil unions and other arrangements in accordance with the will of the people. Also, the specific reference above to “the next generation” is no accident. The anti-gay right is well aware of the generation gap on this issue, and they are frantic to deny the next generation the right to choose for itself.
This amendment actually creates a tremendous opportunity to mobilize justice-minded voters who might not otherwise bother. No offense to the pundits, but there is such a thing as paradigm shift. Candidates should take note.
Yes, Virginia, we’re everywhere
It looks like other Virginia bloggers have noticed that Some Families Foundation alert.
Too Conservative for the most part gets it. The specious implication that opponents of the anti-civil union constitutional amendment are non-religious, the ideological blindness that is causing this wing of the Republican party to alienate potential voters, and the hypocrisy of those calling themselves Christians who single out the GLBT community for bashing are all glaring examples of what’s wrong with the politics of the anti-gay right.
We know that among our readers, there are quite a few who would be active in the Republican party for fiscal and other reasons if they didn’t get the message loud and clear that they are excluded because of their sexual orientation. Thanks for trying to talk some sense into the destructive extremists in your party, TC. It’s worth a try.
On the other hand, Two Conservatives has a post up that exclusively focuses on the “Sunday-during-church” meme that is so prominent in the SFF alert. There’s a self-congratulatory tone about this analysis, as if the author thinks he has discovered something of great significance in the fact that Equality Virginia canvassers would do outreach on a Sunday – namely that EV is selectively targeting “non-churchgoers.”
It probably hasn’t occurred to him that only some Equality Virginia supporters will be doing this outreach. At the same time, many more of us will be in church, sharing our lives with the other “churchgoers” who will be voting against any mean-spirited – and dare we say un-Christian – attempts to harm our families and drive us from our communities.
When members of the anti-gay right try to analyze and explain how we advocate for ourselves, their accusations tell us a great deal about their own activities – in this case, that they intend to selectively “target churchgoers.” But we already knew that.