Maine gay marriage opponents collect enough signatures to get issue on November ballot
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OK – the ‘No on Prop 8′ campaign group in California need to get their asses over to Maine pronto to prevent Maine becoming yet another state which allows minority rights be determined by popular vote. Remember that Hitler was elected!
First, people argued that it was the legislature that should define marriage, not the courts. Now that legislatures are defining marriage to be inclusive of same-sex couples, they are arguing that the people should vote in state-wide ballots. Civil rights issues AREN’T for voting because the bigotry of the majority should never suppress the rights of the minority.
The idea that a minority’s rights can be suppressed by a majority makes me very uncomfortable. Civil rights issues should NEVER be put to referenda; otherwise society will continue to go backwards through people’s paranoid fears of things different from themselves. Who’s marriage rights will be next to go? Interracial couples will be forced to divorce? I hope the people of Maine see through this bigotry.
Well done to the gay marriage opponents in Maine. Next, we should ban interracial marriage, and after that, stop black people marrying.
(Please note the sarcasm.)
F**king disgusting. They DON’T have that right. F**k the people. It’s not down to them.
If I get enough votes can I stop black people marring??
i hope the pro-marriage lobby beat them down. a repeat of california would be awful (even if it would further anger the lgbtqi community into action)
It shouldn’t be up to the voters to decide. The government is suppose to be there to support and uphold the equal rights of minorities. If that wasn’t the case, how long would slavery hung on in the South??
Most problem caused by bigoty Christianism, special under Youth Nazi Pope
Xaria: It would be ok if it angered people into action, but it doesn’t (I don’t count whining in the streets for a couple of hours as action).
But, we still have to see if it makes it to the ballot. These people say they’ve collected enough signatures, but that probably just means they’ve had the right number of people sign. They still all have to be VALID and not DUPLICATED. I think they still have a long way to go, and the longer this goes on, the harder it will be to get new valid signatures.
As soon as they started collecting signatures it was obvious they were going to get enough to bring the law to a vote because gay marriage is such a divisive issue and it’s detractors will be keen to let their outrage be registered. I think for gay people in Maine it is better for this to come to a vote sooner rather than later.
Part of the problem is that the Federal Government has handed this off to the states, something that they didn’t do with Civil Rights in the 60s. As such, there is no uniform approach, this isn’t a constitutional vote like the vote in California, the constitution of Maine allows the people to vote on a law that the legislature has passed and either uphold or overrule.
Oddly enough, this could be one of the best things to happen for LGBT rights in the USA. Maine is a pretty liberal, forward thinking state and much less religion than some states. Vermont was the first legislature to pass gay marriage into law and Maine could well be the first state to uphold gay marriage in a vote which would be a great thing.
@John K: I think they have enough signatures – any organisation that’s serious about a petition will have set a private higher threshold before announcing and submitting to cover duplicated and invalid ones.
The website FiveThirtyEight has done some interesting analysis predicting the outcome of referendums on this issue at any particular time over the next few years, but annoyingly the site is currently down so I can’t check their Maine prediction.
Persecution:
limiting the right of someone to persecute a despised minority group
I can’t post the links but google FiveThirtyEight for the site and click on the “gay rights” tag for posts on the state wide polls on this. Attitudes in Maine are currently running at just under 50% and of course the referendum will be before any same-sex marriages will have happened in the state (a factor that can, over time, increase the swing). On the raw numbers it looks worse than California did at this stage.
Can someone to put “revoking the churches’ tax-free status” on a ballot? That would be nice, and it would put enough of them out of business to solve a lot of problems.
Let’s do something to revoke the churches’ tax-free status. Make them pay, and put a bunch of them out of business.
Tim Roll-Pickering: Probably right that they collected way more than necessary to compensate, but maybe not. I remember an estimate that they would want to collect over 100,000 signatures before the deadline to make sure they had enough. I doubt they have that many yet.
Marjangles: “Oddly enough, this could be one of the best things to happen for LGBT rights in the USA. Maine is a pretty liberal, forward thinking state and much less religion than some states. Vermont was the first legislature to pass gay marriage into law and Maine could well be the first state to uphold gay marriage in a vote which would be a great thing.”
That’s what we said about California…