Here We Go Again

Here we go again, gearing up to go around again.

In November, Arizona became the first and only state in the nation to turn down a measure defining marriage.

Now Matt Daniels, president of the Alliance for Marriage, says he is counseling Arizona lawmakers to make sure they offer a more acceptable ballot measure next time around — one that doesn't ask voters to deny benefits to couples.

Great. The anti-marriage equality Prop 107 narrowly failed at the polls last November, purely because the campaign against it went to great lengths to avoid all but the most oblique or buried (three or four clicks deep on the website) references to gay people. It was probably too much to hope that the anti-gay side would stand down after that volley failed, content with banning same-sex marriage at the statute level rather than by constitutional amendment. Way too much to hope, as it turns out.

But forces in this state have already said they won't settle for anything less than a constitutional amendment that makes it illegal for even straight couples to enter into civil unions or receive domestic-partnership benefits.

"I strongly disagree with Matt Daniels' comments," said Cathi Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy, which authored Proposition 107. "Our goal has been to protect the institution of marriage, not just the name of marriage."

Bullshit. Your goal, Ms. Herrod, has been to kick gay people in the teeth any way you can under the guise of a moralistic "will of the people" ballot measure. If you wanted to "protect marriage" according to the arguments your side has spewed, you'd do better to outlaw divorce, outlaw civil weddings (and perhaps any religious weddings not performed under the auspices of a Christian or Jewish ceremony), and mandate procreation.

Of course, this forces me into the paradoxical position of having to root for a Herrod-formulated proposition to be the one landing on the next ballot, given that version's failure the first time around. If the Center for Arizona Policy puts forth a reworded measure explicitly denying civil unions or benefits only to same-sex couples, while preserving them for straight couples, there's no way it would pass constitutional muster. The downside would be the huge symbolic gobsmack of seeing exactly how many of my fellow citizens would gleefully vote for such a vindictive piece of legislation.

It wouldn't be surprising, but that wouldn't make it any less sad.

The Center for Arizona Policy's mindset is summed up by this passage from their position paper on "Public Policy and the Church:"

Sure, Christians could and should strive to obey God's Word without worrying about everyone else. But if we really believe that God loves everyone, and we know that His revelation about how we should behave would benefit everyone, isn't it the ultimate expression of Christian love to strive to have public policy reflect the perfect wisdom of God's law in every way possible?

So hey, we could go ahead and live and let live, but wouldn't it be so much more loving for us to impose our narrow interpretation of our religion's holy book through legislation compelling everyone in the country to live by the rules we chose for ourselves? Fuck. What truly galls me is when these people insist they're not really Dominionists; it's just that their vision of perfect wisdom to be enforced with the cudgel of the law coincides--amazingly--with a fundamentalist reading of the Bible. And then they howl that by not formalizing Christian religious dicta into American civil law, we're forcing the True Christians to live like us heathens.

Mandating marriage equality does not compel straight fundamentalist Christians to marry someone of their same gender or eschew a church ceremony, any more than legalized abortion compels all pregnant women to go in for a D&C. That's the reality-based version of the world. In their twisted zero-sum version of the world, opening all civil contract law to all competent, consenting adults constitutes the creation of special rights that diminish their own.

I am sick of it all.