Massachusetts is Now the Most Hated State in America!

[The Reclaimer]

You need to consider the fact that how people define marriage, is going to determine how they feel about the situation.

[The Reclaimer]

You need to consider the fact that how people define marriage, is going to determine how they feel about the situation.

[InsaneImpmon]

Thus, in 6 months, unless Gov. Romney somehow manages to overrule the decision (which isn't very likely), every gay couple in the state will be allowed to get married.

Oh it gets worse, the US has law that requires other states to regocnize legal marriages so every gay couples could be headed to MA to get hitched. I can see it: Churches forced to postpone marriage cermonies due to shortage of license,

The best part is watching all the right-wing pricks piss and moan about it, because, unless they can come up with some smart way to justify denying marriage licenses to gays that doesn't involve the usual argument that marriage is "a sacred institution between a man and a woman", gay marriage will be legalized in MA, and then they will only be able to stop it by amending the constitution, which is damn near impossible.

Let them piss and moan. They are walking on thin ice. If they don't overturn the gay couple issue, all anti-gay will vore for someone else at the next election. If they *do* overturn the new law, all pro-gay would have a recall drive that makes California recall look pale in comparasion.

Of course, Bush has already vowed to "defend the sanctity of marriage", because, as the War Against Terror has taught us, he is a fucking moron. But he can't really do anything, since only congress can amend the constitution, and that can take up to 6 years, and, assuming that America is not filled with morons, Bush won't still be in office in 6 years.

I certantly didn't vote for Bush at the last election. How he got in is beyond me. (no thanks to those dumbass Florida officials who couldn't design an easy to use foolproof ballot.)

And Bush certantly won't be in office in 6 years. Everyone has a max of 2 terms, each 4 years. Bush already used up 3 years of his first term and assuming morons screws up the voting, he'd be in office until 2K8 but not in 2K9 at all.

Ah, Massachusetts. Our state was the first to rebel against the British, we were the first state to give slaves their freedom, and now, we're legalizing gay marriage. We ought to change our motto to: "Massachusetts - Stirring up political shit since the 17th century"

Good one. Maybe you should submit that one?

[urban dream]

Hurray for Massachusetts, Hawai and Canada, then! :D Way to go! The world needs to be more open minded!

[milk me!]

As an addendum, I'll just tack on this juicy editorial from the Washington Post (also printed in a few other papers across the country today).

This May Be Good for Marriage

By Richard Cohen
Thursday, November 20, 2003; Page A41

If Tom DeLay had half a brain (if pigs had wings), he would have cheered the news that Massachusetts may legalize gay marriages. The institution for which the House majority leader has such concern, traditional marriage, is both wobbly and wheezing -- the butt of cynical jokes, a gold mine for divorce lawyers and, even for the non-initiated, the triumph of hope over experience. Gays, bless 'em, may wind up saving marriage.

In ways that DeLay and his conservative cohorts seem not to recognize, marriage itself is on the rocks. Twenty percent of all first marriages don't make it past five years, and after a mere decade, one-third of all marriages are kaput. Married couples, once dominant in both life and sitcom TV, have gone from 80 percent of all households in the 1950s to 50 percent today. If you peek into the average home, the chances of finding a married couple with kids are just one in four. DeLay, don't delay, marriage needs help.

Now along come gay couples to rescue marriage from social and economic irrelevance, casting a queer eye on a straight institution. They seek it for pecuniary reasons -- issues such as estate taxes, etc. -- but also because they seem to be among the last romantics. (No shotgun marriages here.) The odd thing about the opposition to gay marriage is that if the opponents were not so blinded by bigotry and fear, they would see that gay men and lesbians provide the last, best argument for marriage: love and commitment.

There is scant reason for marriage anymore, which is why it has become a dicey proposition -- and why 86 million adults are unmarried. Women don't need men to support them or defend them from saber-toothed tigers -- and they can, I have read, even have babies on their own.

Men, of course, still need women, if only to bear children and to remind them that they are uncommunicative. (Is a marriage between two men a zone of total silence?) But single guys can adopt kids, and sex is readily available almost anywhere, or so I am told by various city magazines.

There is an analogy here -- I think. Just as gays are renowned for moving into urban areas that others have fled, for refurbishing whole neighborhoods and making them attractive, so they might rehabilitate and renew marriage. Of all people, they need it the least. They have already shattered convention with their lifestyles, and demolished our comfy and parochial notions of sexual categories -- heterosexual male, heterosexual female and nothing else. But when it comes to marriage of all things, some of them want to veer toward the traditional. They want commitment and love -- a universal truth in a manner that Jane Austen never envisaged.

The dour Republican Party, with DeLay and others promising a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (can Elizabeth Taylor be included, too?), is once again willing to stand athwart history, yelling stop. In the short term, it will work, since little in politics has the power bigotry does -- certainly not reason. The many GOP politicians who have gay children will have to stifle all that their kids have taught them and fall behind DeLay in his backward march toward a vanished world. Some, though, may succumb to knowledge and empathy and suggest -- softly, of course -- that love and commitment are universals and not confined to a single category of sexual orientation.

Gay marriage will not and cannot weaken the institution of marriage. A heterosexual is not somehow less married because a homosexual has tied the knot. On the contrary, the institution will be strengthened, bolstered by the very people who for conservatives represent everything loathsome about modernity. Gays are not attacking marriage. They want to practice it.

"Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for 30." So says the prince in Giuseppe di Lampedusa's classic novel, "The Leopard." This cynical observation, attributed to a 19th-century man by a 20th-century writer, is hardly out of date. Love is as much a recipe for failure as it is for success, and yet we cling to it because it ennobles us. Love is our emotional opposable thumb, what differentiates us from lower animals, and why we vow -- sometimes over and over again -- a lifetime's commitment, marriage. If gays can do it and maybe do it better, then Tom DeLay could do us all a real public service by just stepping aside.

A whole lot of wonderful people want to come down the aisle.

cohenr@washpost.com

[Gnostic Metatron Prime]

Hurray for Massachusetts, Hawai and Canada, then! :D Way to go! The world needs to be more open minded!

Hawaii doesn't have gay marriages, or even civil unions. They just have tolerance.

[The One Caron]

People don't hate Massachusetts because they allowed gay marriage.
They hate Massachusetts because it sucks.

Homer Simpson, I quote: "Awwwwwww! They stuck us at Taxxachusetts!"
(Episode when they went to Japan)

[Gnostic Metatron Prime]

People don't hate Massachusetts because they allowed gay marriage.
They hate Massachusetts because it sucks.

Homer Simpson, I quote: "Awwwwwww! They stuck us at Taxxachusetts!"
(Episode when they went to Japan)

Actually, it's only people from Massachusetts who hate it because it sucks. The rest of the country hates Massachusetts because we always fuck up the system. After all, we were the ones who dumped the British tea into Boston Harbor, which pretty much forced the rest of the country to rebel against England. And we were also the first state to outlaw slavery.

Actually, there are certain parts of the country that don't even know that Massachusetts is a state. They think we're just part of New York.

[eurtan]

it's all well and good to rebal agent the status quo if you truly belive in what you're doing just don't step on others you you do so.

[Gnostic Metatron Prime]

it's all well and good to rebal agent the status quo if you truly belive in what you're doing just don't step on others you you do so.

Dude, you're missing the point here. The gay folks involved in the gay marriage movement in Massachusetts don't want to step on others or rebel against the status quo. They just want to be allowed to marry, which would give them the same rights as married couples. See, without those rights, things like inheritance, hospital visitation rights, and taxes become a huge pain.

As for the rest of us, the society benefits because, if the gay marriage thing holds, then it weakens the hold that the church has over the state. And trust me, we want the church to have less power.