Left In Lowell

ConCon (the Constitutional Convention) convenes this week and the full legislature will take up the issue of the anti-gay marriage ballot initiative on Wednesday, since the initiative passed muster with the State Supreme Court today. (I’d rant but since this is the same court which granted same sex marriage, there has to be some legal leg to stand on. I still think Reilly could have gone the other way and killed this initiative before it started too.)

The thing is, the bar, for some bizarre reason, is lower for the legislature’s approval, despite this being a constitutional amendment (which in most cases requires a 2/3s majority to go on to be on the ballot for the people’s vote). Only 50 legislators out of the whole assembly need to vote yea. Then 50 need to vote yea again next year, and if it goes through, it gets on the ballot.

Our state represenation is mixed on this. Rep. Golden voted yea on the so-called “compromise” the first year (2004) but nay the second year, due to what I hear is a change of heart on marriage equality. Rep. Murphy voted for the compromise bill two years in a row, but will likely not vote to ban gay marriage altogether as this ballot initiative requires. Rep. Nangle and Sen. Panagiotakos voted both yes for the compromise, but are both staunch conservative-leaning anti-gay-marriage votes. This is a last try to convince them to come on over to the right side of history before Wednesday.

Sen. Panagiotakos, as I understand it, holds his “no gay marriage” position due to his religious convictions, and therefore the “civil unions” compromise (you know, that “seperate but equal” lie) would have been amenable to him. But what I do not understand is, marriage is, first and foremost, civil marriage. What is the difference between the civil marriage my husband and I had, and a “civil unions” designation. It’s all civil! We didn’t get married in any church.

No one is asking his religion, or any other, to perform gay marriage in their church. It would be nice to see it happen, but that’s not what this debate is about.

Now, if you wanted to call all civil marriages …hetero and gay… “civil unions,” that’d be fine by me. Unfortunately, under the law, “marriage” carries some legal weight. If we all want to waste our time reinventing civil marriage into civil unions and rewrite the law just so we can appease people who are caught up in the semantics of the word “marriage”…hey, the Commonwealth doesn’t have anything pressing to get done like health care reform or Fluffernutter bans, or anything.

Take a minute, call our legislators. Tell them to vote nay on the anti-gay marriage initiative. Tell them why - your voice counts! If we can whittle the anti-equal-rights crowd to 49 or less legislators, this waste-of-time anti-gay extremist initiative dies on Wednesday.