North Carolina yesterday became the 30th state to ban same-sex marriage. Early results showed the amendment to its Constitution passing overwhelmingly by as much as 61 percent. The popularity of the amendment and key position of North Carolina in the upcoming presidential election appears to have prompted the White House to cancel an event in the state. President Obama cancelled a scheduled trip to North Carolina on the day of the vote. While Obama opposed the amendment last year, this week the White House was ridiculed by the media over the President’s refusal to support gay marriage and his insistence that his views were still “evolving” on the subject. The cancellation was widely viewed as an effort to avoid renewed questions over Obama’s refusal to take a clear stand on the civil rights question.
There was a huge turnout on Tuesday in North Carolina — attributed to the draw of the referendum. The proposed amendment states that “marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.”
North Carolina is viewed as a key target with Virginia for both campaigns. The vote reflects the division in the state with more liberal urban areas opposing the amendment while more conservative rural areas supporting it.
Just for the record, I have long advocated that the solution to this debate is to get rid of “marriage” licenses in favor of a universal civil union standard — which is closer to the function of the state recording of such unions. I believe that marriage should be left to individual faiths and institutions as a religious-based concept. The role of the state is to record a civil commitment of two individuals to live as one couple. The current debate — including the demand for retroactive termination of marriages — shows how the term marriage continues to inject religiosity into what is a civil contract between citizens.
Notably, the last time North Carolina amended its Constitution on marriage was in 1875 when it banned interracial marriage. That ban only ended in 1971.
Source: CNN
You assume anyone was interested in answering your irrelevant and obviously loaded question other than yourself, KF. You also assume to know how others voted when you don’t have a clue in a very thinly veiled partisan attack that only makes one ask “to what purpose is KF bringing this up in this manner?” None of the answers to that particular question reflect favorably on your methodology or intent, KF.
Res ispa loquitur indeed.
BTW and on a personal note that really is none of your business, I didn’t vote for Clinton. I think he’s a first class asshole who enabled the financial crimes of the later Bush Administration by doing his particular Wall Street master’s bidding and aiding in the dismantling of Glass-Steagall. In addition, I thought Clinton was barely competent as governor of Arkansas (only marginally better than Bush Jr. did in Texas and he was an unmitigated disaster). We haven’t had a decent choice in Presidential candidates since I’ve been able to vote and only really one since Eisenhower to speak of and he got stonewalled by the graft weasels in Congress. When your choices are dumbass puppet #1 and #2 because the system has been rigged over 60 years, you shouldn’t blame others for voting as well as they can given the circumstances. They are at least participating in the appearance of democracy we are still allowed to have by the corporatist fascists who really pull Washington’s strings. So speaking of questions, what is your interest in making such blatantly partisan attacks here, eh KF? Whose boots are you licking exactly? The views of general contempt against both parties is widely held in this venue. That Elaine isn’t as vociferous as I am in saying that I won’t vote for Obama no matter what doesn’t mean that she is wrong because she retains the option to vote for the manifestly lesser of two evils given the far right shift taken place in the GOP (they’ve have indeed lost their brown shirted theocratic fucking minds in case you haven’t been paying attention). It just means she chooses to exercise her options to the best of ability given the constraints of her conscience. Undecided is a legitimate answer. I do not begrudge her this any more than I begrudge Mike Spindell’s statement certain that he will vote Obama for those reasons. The constraints on my actions are personal just as the constraints on their actions vis a vis voting are personal. My reasons are logically valid as are theirs. It is just the value weighting that differs in the decision process. They are people of good conscience even though we disagree in part or in whole about choosing the lesser evil as an option. Just so, they don’t begrudge me my decision and even knowing in detail the reason for that decision, they still respect it.
You don’t seem to respect their decisions because it isn’t in line with yours. And although we seem to have reached a similar decision, I suspect it was via very different paths.
So what exactly is your problem, KF? That people given a Morton’s Fork problem are damned if they do and damned if they don’t? That not all pols who deserve to be damned are damned equally? Tell us, Portnoy, the nature of your complaint in concise non-partisan language.
BFMike.
Don’t get me started on Clinton’s war crimes in the Balkans because they are as notorious as the CIA lies about “mass rape” that were used as the pretext for the American bombing of civilians there.
I was flabbergasted in the late 90’s to watch a McNeil-Lerher News Hour that featured an official “CIA Spokesman” who said, and I paraphrase here, that look, the real reason the US military is bombing Serbia is not all the claims about human rights abuses but rather to, and this is an exact quote, “vanquish the last bastion of soviet-style planned economy on the European Continent.”
Meaning planning an economy for people’s needs rather than relying on the anarchy of the manipulated stock market that usually leads to the ruin of the workers & middle class is what that perfidious war was all about and all the hue & cry about raped women and mass graves was irrelevant to the Pentagon’s fascistic machinations & criminal turpitude in the Balkans.
Blouise and SwM,
It’s confusing as hell, but back to Ohio and HB 194 and the changing of polling places that got me all pissed off. HB 194 has been repealed and prevented from going to a November referendum leaving in place some other earlier law that the Republicans favored. The repeal of HB 194 did not make Dems happy. I think the law that now stands is Senate bill something or other (sorry to be so unhelpful) and all I could find on that was no early voting on the weekend before election day which doesn’t sound too horrible.
I love your research, but you’re gonna kill me with stuff that is no longer relevant. Will you please watch that older stuff? My heart can’t take all this bad news. The other day somebody published a comment that the last two Chicago mayors had been jailed. I just read that the dentist that pulled all the teeth of her ex is a hoax. If I can’t count on the Turley folks (with notable exceptions) for the facts, where am I to go?
Final straw…..Bron may be right about Wisconsin.
OK. Quit wasting bandwidth searching for the answer to my test question because your Google world doesn’t portray working people’s realities, particularly Brown people’s and women’s history as neutrally as you all imagine.
Clinton’s first official act in the white house was one of the most cowardly criminal acts of mass murder in American history.
It’s an irrefragable fact.
That’s right, what he did, in a calculated effort to show all the right wing hawks sucking the teat of the Pentagon that manipulate our foreign policy, which in the end is derived from domestic policy, is to order the lobbing of 4 cruise missiles randomly into the heart of Baghdad which killed hundreds of innocent civilians instantly, one of which demolished an entire apartment building in the middle of an urban city housing millions, which just happened to kill the Woman who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize for poetry while she was sipping her morning tea.
Now why would Clinton, who earned a reputation for wrecking women’s lives with his compound adultery, murder a Nobel Peace Prize winner?
The answer is because he calculated very cynically that in order to prove to all the chickenhawks in the NSC that he wasn’t the gutless turd draft dodger that he really was he needed to do a “manly act” and that act was to retaliate for the attempt on Bush Sr’s life in Kuwait.
That’s right. If you’ll recall that after the First Gulf War Papa Doc Bush Senior made a trip to Kuwait to kiss the hands of the Kuwaiti Emirs and remind them that freedom wasn’t free. During that trip some alleged culprits, probably usual suspects that were rounded up just for the event, were accused of plotting against Bush’s life and were summarily executed.
Despite their Mideastern incompetence the CIA narrative was that Saddam Hussein had engineered a hit squad to take out Bush on that visit to Kuwait but their “prowess” had managed to thwart it.
The audacity of Saddam’s alleged assassination attempt meant payback was in order and Clinton meted out that punishment, not to Saddam and his minions but rather to an innocent sleeping city full of the victims of Saddam, that is, his first act in the white house was to order the launching from a warship anchored in the Gulf exactly 4 cruise missiles with a “random” target, meaning they obliterated whatever they hit in Baghdad, and one missile demolished the apartment building that just happened to house a famous woman who had earned the freakin’ Nobel Peace Prize for poetry.
So some philandering white educated prick, who virtually every “regular” blogger here voted for including Turley, started his administration with a genuine racist war crime against women no less, yet every degenerate Republican bastard alive hounded that weasel as some kind of bleeding heart liberal!
It’s truly hard to imagine what a twisted world we live in when erstwhile progressive & well meaning people hearken back to the good old days when brown women poets were vaporized while sipping tea in their apartment without question, let alone insisting that the best bet for America’s future is this guy whose vaporized entire wedding parties in Pakistan in the name of freedom & democracy.
Res ipsa loquitur
@Karl Friedrich
This is off point and I could look it up but I am too lazy, besides you seem to be the guy who would know.
Didn’t Clinton initiate a bombing mission in the Balkans the night before there was some big impeachment vote?
Maybe there was absolute military necessity, but doesn’t it make you wonder?
I may be wrong but I have had this dim recollection, literally, for years.
substitute the word gun for same sex marriage and see what happens.
Elaine:
I understand perfectly that you choose to vote for Obama as the “lesser evil” as that’s the same position many of my union brothers & sisters, liberal friends & colleagues adopt but I always like to remind them that means they are still casting a vote for evil, for a party born from the slaveholders class, the party that prosecuted every shooting war in the 20th century [Grenada, Panama & Desert Storm weren’t real wars since effectively only one side was shooting] — the same party that engineered not only NAFTA but also the odious ’96 Telecommunications Act that Fox News owes its existence to, the same party that laid the framework for the Patriot Act after OK. City, the same party oversaw the deindustrialization of America and the outsourcing of its manufacturing base, the same party that “ended welfare as we know it,” the same party that has taken money from the trade union movement but sold them down the river at virtually every opportunity, the same party that allowed the gutting of the NLRB and hasn’t lifted a finger to change it, the same party that greenlighted for Criminal Destruction of Iraq, the same party that greenlighted the greatest transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1% from which the criminally incompetent banksters are still pinching themselves in disbelief, the same party that continues to squander enormous blood & treasure in America’s longest & most mindlessly unwinnable war, the party that has now so undermined 200 years of Constitutional jurisprudence that even this blogs preeminent scholar, hero, and founder has drawn the line in the sand which he will not cross and will be abstaining, for the first time in his life, from voting for President.
I’ll conclude with a test question that I’ll wager nobody can answer:
Who here knows what President Clinton’s first official act in the White House was, that is, the very first thing he did officially after being inaugurated?
I’ll give you a hint: it was an act of mass murder that according to every reputable legal scholar, including Turley, constituted an International War Crime.
It is very obvious to me that we have a Two Party system that is for the most part in collusion to control the means of production, just as Karl Marx had suggested. Every single one of his plaforms have been placed into law to some degree and the 2nd, 5th and 10th totally; an Income Tax, a Central bank and Free education for all children, respectively. Thanks to especially those enactments we now live in a totalitarian state that is not smart enough to know it. From Fascism to Totalitarianism: http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Letter-to-Editor.htm?EdNo=001&Info=0193662
any info on how the primary vote in Wisconsin went? I heard it was a blood bath for the unions. Very few people showed up to vote democrat. Is that true?
I also have heard that a bunch of democratic voters have gone back to Mexico and points south. Is that true?
I think democrats are in trouble this year. I am thinking blood bath at the polls. Senate, house and Presidency to republicans? Romney would be the only liberal left in Washington. Although Bernie Sanders and Henry Waxman are perennial favorites.
In West Virginia an inmate got 40% of the primary vote for president. Wow! That sucks.
Then Lugar got his republicon ass beat in his primary.
Are democrats waging a war on Obama?
And then the North Carolina gay marriage loss, I have heard that very democrats came out to vote.
hskiprob,
Slavery? Really? Appeal to emotion.
-15 points.
“If you no longer have the right to a redress of grievences than how do you think you are going to accomplish any of the things you suggest? ”
Please read the whole response to previous questions before re-asking answered questions: “If they don’t take this kind of change willingly, then history will teach them the hard math of 99>1 just like it did the French. I prefer non-violent change, but given the venal corrupt nature of Washington currently I predict something really bad will have to happen before they realize the only way a government survives long term is by looking out for the best interests of all citizens.”
– 0 points but a stern warning for not paying attention and mixing questions
None of the rest of yours response addresses that what I said above is true and you ignore that “DEMOCRACY TAKES WORK BY CITIZENS TO MAINTAIN”.
Non-responsive.
-85 points.
Total: -100 points.
Again, you are free to take a fantasy option if you like, but simply bitching about the problem of corruption isn’t practically looking to resolve it either. Your choices when dealing with non-responsive government are
1) peaceful non-violent resistance
2) do nothing/bitch about it/have fantasy solutions
3) revolt
Personally I advocate a variation of option #1 but realistically what is going to happen is a lot of #2 until enough people are in pain to where #3 happens by default. “The problem with this position is that as soon as the so-called revolution is over – the oligarchs just pick up where they left off. A bunch of people die but nothing really changes.” Is the position of a child. If your problem is with human nature, you engineer the systems to be proofed against human nature by instituting legal changes such as suggested combined with mechanisms of government that make enforcement not optional. If you get caught selling or buying influence and you should have the civilized equivalent of your head cut off for the good of society: a very very long time in prison plus all your assets stripped/your company liquidated/your removal from office now and evermore. Possibly forfeiture of citizenship. I’d even be willing to discuss the death penalty with limited appeals for malfeasance of office and pandering for political favors. If the problem is prostitution (which is a perfect analogy for the situation created by corruption) you make prostitution bear such a significant cost when caught that no sane and/or rational person would try it.
Please read the Democratic Capatalist Illusion and the Myth of the Rule of Law. Hopefully those should help you get out of your delusional state. https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!topic/HarrietRobbins/mURGvK3knbQ http://rsjexperiment.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/the-myth-of-the-rule-of-law/
Blouise,
No problem. Let me know if you want to borrow Weston B. Smith’s tome, as only one-hundred copies were printed and it’s nowhere to be found on the internet!
Peace to all.
gbk,
lol … I’m glad you cleared that up
Blouise,
Actually, I must correct myself. When I stated that, “[b]ut in actual meaning there is little to distinguish the two,” meaning the beliefs of Themonly vs. Themoney, it appears I was wrong.
According to Weston B. Smith’s tome, “The Angst Of Taxes: How To Solidify Your Possessions While Eating Your Neighbor,” it appears that Themoney is a subservient henotheistc belief that is proffered as a path to Themonly, and that both of these gods are subservient to Methe.
Sorry for the confusion.
gbk,
“The etymology of the god Themonly has been slowly corrupted into Themoney. But in actual meaning there is little to distinguish the two.”
Thank goodness I decided to reread the thread other wise I would have missed your rather brilliant “smithing”. Well done!
I, too, have heard that President Obama has attained clarity and now claims to support same-sex-marriage. As with all things Obama, I’ll believe it when his administration’s justice department brings suit against states that infringe upon the civil rights of American citizens in this regard.
hskiprob,
Democracy worked for substantial periods of time throughout history: Sparta, Athens, Rome, the Guild democracies of Medieval Europe, Venice, Florence, Flanders, the Iroquois, modern Europe and America until the end of WWII and the advent of the Cold War. Even the Aztec had elections, but only for a speaker, not a ruler. History is replete with examples of successful democracies.
That democracy needs to be maintained to survive is a separate issue. If you want a “set and leave” form government? You’ll end up with some form of tyranny every time. Democracy requires informed participation to survive. It takes work. That’s just the way it is. No democracy will last without the required work by citizens. Democracies don’t fail because the form is inherently flawed. They fail because people fail to do the maintenance required to keep them in place because the battle for democracy is a perpetual battle against those who would subjugate, i.e. the oligarchs and the would-be kings.
Now a couple of questions for you.
Point to a civilization of any substantive size that has ever worked for a prolonged period of time without a government of one for or another?
You can’t.
Point to a civilization with a government that has a form that works better for ensuring freedom and liberty than democracy? (Benevolent dictatorships/monarchs do not count.)
You can’t.
Point to a system of laws without a method of enforcement that has ever worked on the scale of a civilization?
You can’t.
A system of laws without a mechanism for enforcement is a list of suggestions and is in no way different from openly embracing the tyranny of the strong over the weak.
“That is not my only option. I can have the option of not wanting any of them which is my current option.”
Sure, you can opt for a fantasy option if you like. It doesn’t mean that you have that choice in reality. Your choices really are as listed above, your disapproval notwithstanding. The option you want isn’t available and to think it is viable requires a totally and completely unrealistic interpretation of human nature to happen.
Not all religions have marriage ceremonies or expressly sanctify marriages (e.g., some branches of Buddhism). Marriage is the contract. If religions want to attach themselves that, call it something different or make the attachment clear. The idea of giving “marriage” to religions is the whole wingnut agenda for this and it obscures the historic and legal purposes of marriage.
Gene,
In a nutshell.
The US made slavery work for a while just as it has democracy. It’s a fools position. Start thinking in terms of real changes and stop excepting authoritarian rule through various governmental systems.
Gene H. and Blouise: What happens in a society when the Citizens no longer have the right of Redress of Grievence? You should know that this has already occured in 2007.
If you no longer have the right to a redress of grievences than how do you think you are going to accomplish any of the things you suggest?
“Remove special interest spending from the campaign/electoral and legislative processes and make taking money other than salary a felony for politicians that mandates removal from office, forfeiture of assets and substantial prison terms for both the graftor and graftee. Amend the Constitution to limit corporate personality back to its original form and utility. Campaign finance reform. Criminal law reform to adequately punish white collar offenders. If they don’t take this kind of change willingly, then history will teach them the hard math of 99>1 just like it did the French. I prefer non-violent change, but given the venal corrupt nature of Washington currently I predict something really bad will have to happen before they realize the only way a government survives long term is by looking out for the best interests of all citizens.”
The problem with this position is that as soon as the so-called revolution is over – the oligarchs just pick up where they left off. A bunch of people die but nothing really changes.
@Mike Sallese (@pesky9)
Mike, I think many of us would argue that constitutional rights should not be open to restriction on the basis of popular, democratic vote.
So when a popular vote interferes with the constitutional rights of a particular group, then yes we expect the federal government to ‘shove it down the throats’.
And BTW is there is ever a popular vote to seize your property, and march you off to a compound behind barbed wire, there are still some of us who will demand that the president ‘shove it down there throats’ because there is a fundamental violation – regardless of the popular vote.
Some would argue that marriage is not a constitutional right. Well maybe so. But when one thinks of natural rights, I can hardly think of any right more fundamental that the right to decide the person with whom one would spend one’s life.
And from another perspective, if they don’t hurt any body, don’t break anything, and don’t frighten the horses, whose business is it anyway?
And finally for those of you who are only implementing the laws of god. The last I heard he was all powerful. So why not follow his laws yourself and let him take care of enforcing his own laws on the rest of us?
“Why must I opt for monarchy or a dictatorhship when democracy fails? ”
Because those are your only options:
1) Rule by One
2) Rule by the Few
3) Rule by the Many
“Your are not considering the facts that democracies have never worked. ”
And that would be your ill-informed opinion. Democracy works when citizens are educated and participate and politicians are held accountable for their action. If you want to point to our current government as a failure, you’re not considering the fact that it is a democracy in name only and has been an ever encroaching oligarchy since the end of WWII. Democracy doesn’t work in this country because it has been stolen piecemeal over time by “special interests”.
“I was in the Democratic Party and they do not even pratice their own democratic philosphies.”
So what? You point to a flaw in partisanship, not democracy itself as a form. The form is fine. Partisanship is for suckers playing into the hands of oligarchs though.
The answer certainly isn’t Libertarians. Their policies play into economic tyranny even faster than those of the GOP or DNC. They are crippled by a lack of understanding of how government do, can and should work in the real world combined with an economic platform that is pure fantasy.
“So what do we do now Gene H?”
Remove special interest spending from the campaign/electoral and legislative processes and make taking money other than salary a felony for politicians that mandates removal from office, forfeiture of assets and substantial prison terms for both the graftor and graftee. Amend the Constitution to limit corporate personality back to its original form and utility. Campaign finance reform. Criminal law reform to adequately punish white collar offenders. If they don’t take this kind of change willingly, then history will teach them the hard math of 99>1 just like it did the French. I prefer non-violent change, but given the venal corrupt nature of Washington currently I predict something really bad will have to happen before they realize the only way a government survives long term is by looking out for the best interests of all citizens.
First, show me one democracy in world history that has ever worked for a prolonged period of time. That is not my only option. I can have the option of not wanting any of them which is my current option. Why do I have to choose to be ruled by anyone? If you want to be ruled by someone else or some group, have at it, but keep me out it. Try ruling yourself.
NOT EVOLVING Mitt Doesn’t Support Gay Marriage Jim Rogash / Getty Images
1. Mitt Doesn’t Support Gay Marriage
With chatter growing louder that President Obama will come out in support of gay marriage on Wednesday, Mitt Romney said at a campaign event in Colorado that he still does not support equal marriage rights—or even civil unions—for same-sex couples. “When these issues were raised in my state of Massachusetts, I indicated my view, which is that I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name,” Romney told a local Fox News-affiliate reporter.
Read it at ABC News