It's like they're trying to induce homicidal rage...

[sarahmichelef]

Yesterday on Talk of the Nation they were talking about the Senate debate of the Marriage Protection Amendment. They had some guy on declaring that the point was to protect marriage as it has always existed - between one man and one woman. I simply turned to the radio and said "Are you trying to make me homicidal?" The good news is that the timing couldn't be better for my class, since we're talking about the gay rights movement and gay marriage on Thursday.

And then this morning they were talking about the damn immigration reform bills. I want them to decide why we need to militarize the Mexican border. Is it because the brown folks are coming and taking all those lovely meatpacking and strawberry-picking jobs that Americans are beating down the doors for? Or is it about terrorism? But the thing that made me jump up out of bed yelling at the TV was the following sequence:

1. Shrub wants to militarize the Mexican border.
   
2. The US-Canada border is the longest international border in the world, and it's really very porous.
   
3. The recently-foiled terror plot in Ontario is evidence that we need to tighten border security with Canada.
   

That's right. Because when a bunch of Canadians make plans to go all Timothy McVeigh/Terry Nichols on Toronto and Ottawa's collective ass, we need to worry about our safety.

Oh, and here's one for cranky_dragon. Did you know that Canada's loose immigration laws are one of the reasons we need to be concerned? Yeah. Thought you'd appreciate that one.

Comments

[ellid.livejournal.com]

They had some guy on declaring that the point was to protect marriage as it has always existed - between one man and one woman.

Guess they aren't familiar with King David, who had at least three wives (Michal, Abigail, and Bathsheba), or Solomon, who had several hundred, or the Prophet Mohammed, who had seven, or the Slavonic Orthodox rites binding same-sex couples into special relationships, or common law marriages, or....

I keep hoping that I'll run into someone who tries to tell me that my minister and her partner being allowed to marry threatens heterosexual marriage. It will be a great pleasure to tell the idiot that what wrecked *my* marriage was my ex-husband falling in love with a girl half his age and leaving me without warning.

[alphasarah.livejournal.com]

No kidding. That's the part that makes me want to go into Freddy Kruger slasher mode.

I used to joke with a friend of mine at UMass that the fact that she and her spouse were legally married made me feel terribly insecure.

M jokes that in fact gay marriage did threaten our marriage. See, he and our friend Nick had a bet that half of the marriages among our college friends would end in divorce by a certain date. (Nick said they would M said they wouldn't.) That date was fast approaching when the MA decision was handed down, and Nick was two divorces short of winning the bet. So he called us up to propose to Matthew, which would have given Nick the two divorces he needed to win the bet. It didn't work, though. ;^)

[greyhame.livejournal.com]

A book I have, but haven't gotten around to reading yet (I picked it up among a slew of others when I worked at a used bookstore), which provides another angle on "how marriage has always been" is Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell, which argues that same-sex unions (not called "marriage" at the time, but at least equivalent to "civil unions" in modern terminology) were certainly not unknown in either the Catholic or the Eastern Orthodox church.

[spanish-rhode.livejournal.com]

OMG! That makes me so angry!