Thomas Peters thinks he caught us acting hypocritically; that had to have felt refreshingly different -- but no

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01/26/2012

by Jeremy Hooper

And now this from NOM's Thomas Peters:

[NOM Blog]

Nope. We won't change our message at all. Civil rights shouldn't be voted on. Ever. That is not the way to solidify minority rights and protections, not ultimately. And the far-right knows this too, which is why they've been on a decades-long war against "activist judges."

The reason we are going back to the ballot in Maine? That would be because we did already do the leg work, make the connections, show up at hearings, state our cases, and manage to pass a marriage bill once before. Only thing? Certain people took it upon themselves to position that process as wrong and unfair to "THE PEOPLE." This self-appointed crowd of "people's vetoers" stripped us of a right that we earned the right way (or one of the right ways). It was a right that we worked very hard to obtain. It was and is a right that we deserve.

So no, we are not going to go through that same procedure again and have yet another negatively-charged "people's veto" vote (which would surely happen, since the other side has the petitioning process down to a science). This time, we are going straight to the ballot, asking the marriage equality question in a positive way. We are giving locals the opportunity to remedy what happened in 2009. We'd much rather not. We'd much rather be enjoying the in-place equality, which could be a settled issue by now. But again: Certain people would not allow that to happen, leaving us with no choice. We are asking people to use the ballot process to restore past (and passed) legislation, which is a very different conversation from using the direct ballot process to stand in the way of fairness.