In all the push to
defeat Prop 8 (aka Prop Hate) in California, several equally abhorrent measures elsewhere are getting less attention than they deserve.
Florida has Proposition 2, aka the
Florida Marriage Amendment, the language of which reads on the Florida ballot: "This amendment protects marriage as the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife and provides that no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized." See that, there? Not only would it enact discrimination (as 26 other states have already done), but it would dissolve existing civil unions between straight couples who have not chosen to marry, for reasons of their own.
This lovely YouTube video gets right to the heart of why that's important. And, of course, the amendment precludes judicial review, which is the recourse of those who know perfectly well that they're proposing something which can't stand the light of day. (Like cockroaches, or rats.) For more information on the amendment and how to defeat it,
SayNo2 and
Florida Red and Blue are your destinations.
Arizona also has a constitutional amendment on its ballot,
Prop 102. It, too, would enact the discrimatory language of "only one man and one woman" marriage into Arizona's constitution. Having already been rejected in 2006, it would be nice to think that Arizona would again reject this nastiness. Unfortunately, that's far from certain. Given that the measure was placed on the ballot under questionable conditions (in which it was being filibustered and the floor was given to a supporter of the measure; the state Senate Ethics Committee found that it was fair, but the vote was along party lines; given the consistent unethical behavior of the Republican party, who controlled the Senate, that committees's fairness is itself questionable), it would be good to see it shot down once more.
Vote No on Prop 102 and
Arizona Together: Help Defeat Prop 102 for more information.
For those may have who wondered why I haven't participated in the "marriage meme", it's because I haven't made the effort. But this ought to clear up the fact that I believe that
marriage is NOT a special case of one man and one woman; rather, it's an opportunity for consenting adults to proclaim and confirm their love for each other, in whatever number and combination they mutually choose. It's nobody else's business which genders or numbers participate.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
