CA Prop 8

In the short time Jessica and I have been blogging we've had people from all over the world come by and read TP. Leave a comment or something will ya?

So with that said a California ballot initiative might be of fringe interest to our readers, but it's something that I'm sure every state is going to have to deal with one way or another in the near future.

Prop 8 would amend the California constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. It's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen.

I'm not here to argue morality; as that would be totally pointless. Everyone has their own ideas about what is right and wrong. What I will tell you is that amending the constitution to effectively take rights away from a group of people is unprecedented, wrong, and goes totally against the point of a constitution.

The founding fathers wrote the constitution with the understanding that a) Society changes, b) government does NOT endow people with rights, we already had them and c) We tell the government what it can do, not the other way around. If you've ever read that crazy old washed up "Bill of Rights", you'll notice that the first amendment begins with "Congress shall make no law" and so on.

Prop 8 will specifically take away the right for a homosexual couple to be legally "married." Even if they get all the same legal protections with a civil union in California, it doesn't matter. I have the right to change my name to Donkey Kong and the government of the state of California can't tell me not to. Anything less is just "back of the bus."

Prop 8 proponents, mostly funded by the men-only, kind of crazy Knights of Columbus, have some pretty hilarious ads. In one of them, a little five or six year old kid runs up to her mom and happily explains how teacher told her about gay marriage today. The mother is absolutely horror-stricken, then some old white guy tells us that the gays are shoving marriage down everyone's throat and that we don't have a choice. Specifically, it claims (false) that California schools would have to teach gay marriage to children, that it paves the way (false) for people to be sued over their personal beliefs and that churches would lose their tax status (false) if they refused to change their policies to conform with same sex marriage.

Society has changed. Nobody but uber-conservative damn-you-to-hell christians give a crap about gay marriage, so they have to lie to you about your freedoms being infringed upon to lure you into supporting prop 8.

I'm married. I love my wife. To say that homosexuals getting married degrades the sanctity of my marriage is absolutely asinine beyond comprehension. We had a beautiful , religious, family attended ceremony, an awesome honeymoon, and plan to have way too many kids- the totally 'normal' American family story. But we had those things- and are planning the future ones- because we want to. Because we have assigned value to them. Our marriage is only as strong as we make it, and absolutely nobody but us can affect that in any way. My point here is that gay marriage is not taking away the freedoms or rights of anyone else, so government needs to stay the hell away.

But we can't have people doing what they 'want' can we? Religion has always been about control(and I'd argue that is 90% a good thing). But what is striking to me is that a "charity" group like Knights of Columbus is willing to spend MILLIONS of dollars for Prop 8 ads when there are still starving homeless people in this country, gangs are out of control, we have a massive budget deficiet and we are at war.

Maybe not as much striking as sickening.

Anyway, here are some hilarious anti-prop 8 ads.