The rhetoric sharpens. The archbishop declines to meet with gay Catholics, then appeals for charity in a Globe op ed piece. Charity for whom, one wonders, suspecting he means for Catholics in their avowed and doctrinal objection to homosexuality. A group of black Protestant clergy sniff: Do not call your struggle one for "civil rights." We suffered more than you did. Gays must not wed. The Bible says so.
Outside the state house the placards grow more stridently Phelpsian, the appeals grow more blatantly evangelical and fundamentalist. Let there be no further doubt that this anti-gay marriage constitutional effort is an attempt to write sectarian Christianity into civil law. To make me subject to the stipulations of doctrine that I reject.
The latest rhetorical gambit is to invoke Sweden. To correllate gay marriages with a plethora of supposed social ills. The old post hoc propter hoc fallacy. One might just as well correllate herring consumption with divorce rate. The intellectual dishonesty is staggering. Or, more charitably, the stupidity is staggering.
Inside the state house the attempts to compromise with social justice produce a convoluted mess of legal text and political strategy -- an amendment that says: marriage must be between a man and a woman. Gays shall have a "civil union" that confers the same rights and responsibilities.
Separate and probably not equal.
Governor Romney, AKA the Mitthead, looking more like J.R. Bob Dobbs by the minute,
vows to appeal to the Supreme Court to postpone the May 17th deadline for allowing gay marriage, and, eye on the White House, hints at other imperial tactics up his sleeve.
We can only hope that, eventually, we will be snapping our fingers to some latter day Mingus' Fables of Faubus-like tune -- Myths of Mitt perhaps ? -- appalled at the bitter, destructive prejudices of a backward age.
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