« Go back a post || Return to G-A-Y homepage || Haul tail to next post »
05/14/2012
Gay team has won nothing, says man whose state's gays can marry right this very second
Iowa Family Leader president Bob Vander Plaats, assessing the lay of the land from his point of view:
"I'm a former basketball coach, and when basketball teams exit the locker room, and you have one team that's 32-0 and you have another team that's 0-32, it's awfully hard for the team that's 0-32 to say that this is inevitable, we are going to win the championship. That's just not the case" [SOURCE: Family Leader video]
Right. Except for one thing, Bob: The people in the bleachers don't get to use their majority whims to determine the winner! Nor do the cheerleaders, who concocted contrived chants for popularity or profit. This "game" is played on a field with points and players and refs and rules. The full scoreboard paints a different picture.
This marriage fight is not defined by the public voting record (which is itself a flawed stat, since the earliest states came at a completely unwinnable time in states where we were hardly even engaged). The truth is that same-sex couples can marry right now in six states and the nation's capital, and could possibly be marrying in an additional three states (MD, WA, ME) by year's end. There is also the Prop 8 case, which has plenty of open-door potential attached to it. And of course there are other places where we are laying the groundwork to extend the freedom to marry. These advances are simply huge.
Bob and Co. want to make this all about the public vote because it is the one arena where they are free to use lies, misrepresentations, nakedly faith-based arguments, and even demonstrable animus to rally the needed bare majority. But don't be fooled—people like Bob Vander Plaats are completely freaked out by the fact that, in just a decade's time, the United States has gone from a country where zero states had marriage equality to a nation where we are nearing 20% coverage. And even the votes that they are "winning" are narrowing, right alongside the polls. In fact, I'm more than convinced that we now live in an America where, if every person were required to vote before he or she could begin an election day morning, we would win in virtually all of the states. The truth is that the "protect marriage" crowd is extremely engaged and hyper-motivated on this issue, whereas the "live and let live" crowd is more ragtag, harder to reach, and more prone to voting apathy. Bob Vander Plaats knows this, which is precisely why he will keep this thing at the polls for as long as he possibly can, just as past anti-civil-rights movements kept their respective battles at plebiscite until they no longer could.
Bob lives in a state, Iowa, where an unanimous high court supported the constitutionally sound freedom to marry. Bob can overlook that little nugget all he wants, trying his damnedest to cast the independent judiciary out of this civil rights process. It's an intellectual airball. If he sticks with it, Bob will be the player who ultimately fouls out of this game.
Your thoughts
comments powered by Disqus
