Earlier today, Republicans in the Senate suffered an embarassing loss on their federal marriage amendment; there was no vote on the amendment at all, and they weren’t even able to get 50% of the Senate to vote for closing the debate. The final vote tally was 48-50; the two missing votes, of course, were Senators Kerry and Edwards.<\/p>\n
I suppose I should be thrilled, but I’m not. The inability of the anti-gay side to be even a little honest about anything is too depressing; Republicans in the House are already proposing a non-Constitutional method of keeping the courts from overturning DOMA, after months of claiming that there was no possible way aside from amending the Constitution, and that they were only doing that as a last resort. Well, I guess the important thing is that they got to spread an extra bit of anti-gay hate into the world.<\/p>\n
I’m dispirited also by how weak the Democrats I saw on C-SPAN were in debate, and (as GA says<\/a>) how many of them took the “of course I’m against gay marriage, but…” line. Not to mention the political cowardice shown by Kerry and Edwards. (If being cowardly is the way to win elections, why did the Democrats get their asses kicked in 2002?)<\/p>\n The good news is, poll after poll after poll has shown that young people are much more on the side of fairness and equality. As bruising as all these short-term skirmishes are, in the long term we’ve already won the war. In a couple of generations, no politician will dare speak out against marriage fairness, and the folks who are currently taking a brave stand againast equality will all be lying to their grandchildren about what they did during the second Bush administration..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Earlier today, Republicans in the Senate suffered an embarassing loss on their federal marriage amendment; there was no vote on the amendment at all, and they weren’t even able to get 50% of the Senate to vote for closing the … Continue reading