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EDITOR OF REDSTATE

Jim Martin’s Fundraiser

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  November 24th, 2008 at 11:04 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

For those of you who think we should just let the Democrats have sixty seats and let them run the place, this is an important story. It’s an important story about how much damage the Democrats could do and how some groups, besides unions, are desperately seeking sixty Democrat senators.

Down in Georgia, the Stonewall Democrats are throwing a fundraiser for Jim Martin. The Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered groups out there are aggressively fundraising and agitating for a filibuster proof Democrat controlled Senate.

Why?

Because the gay marriage movement has taken a serious setback. The gay rights movement knows it needs to pick off Saxby Chambliss to undermine democratic efforts in the several states to reaffirm marriage as between a man and a woman. They’ll need Jim Martin’s help to stack the federal judiciary with far left judges. And they will need a Democrat controlled Senate to undermine the Defense of Marriage Act.

It is another reason we need to rally for Saxby Chambliss.

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COMMENTS

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  • Next93

    They’re already at a filibuster-proof majority; I don’t see the republican leadership being able to stop defectors on key votes.

    And they’ll probably be lead across the aisle by McCain.

  • JLenardDetroit

    in the future. They have proven fairly inept at even STOPPING (blocking) the Progressives in most agenda items (let alone turn back the clock when having had the chance). So it is an OBSOLUTE MUST to have as many people in position to prevent the “Progression” of the most Left-wing group of Leaders ever assembled in Washington.

    RINOs must be pressured by us to NO END to get their act together. Time they step up and do the job, or just leave the damn Party and join the Democrat caucus. Put up, or GET THE HELL OUT OF THE (supposedly more) CONSERVATIVE PARTY! Tired of them giving everyone else a bad name.

    SENATOR MCCAIN… PLEASE RESIGN/RETIRE… NOW

  • RobW

    I honestly can’t understand why “the party of small government and individual responsibility” thinks they can tell everyone who they can marry and who they can’t. No one’s marriage needs to be protected from gay people, and the abstract concept of marriage sure doesn’t need your help. Relevant Onion article about defending marriage.

    Do you think gay marriage is immoral and wrong? That’s fine. Great even. Just don’t get one and leave everyone else the hell alone. It’s the respectful, small government thing to do.

  • aaronbg

    n/t

  • bs
  • tcgeol

    Marriage is purely about government recognition and implicit approval of a relationship. You say that you want the government to have to approve of homosexuals marrying. That makes the government bigger, not smaller.

    That isn’t really an argument for or against homosexual marriage, but you can’t really argue for it on a small government ticket. Federalist grounds are a bit different.

  • bs
  • E_Pluribus_Unum

    “Just don’t get [a gay "marriage"] and leave everyone else the hell alone. It’s the respectful, small government thing to do.”

    Before the radical gay-power movement, I don’t think the law addressed in any direct way the definition of marriage, because like most dictionary words it was pretty plain.

    One could make an effective conservative argument that government should not be in the business of discussing marriage at all. But since they have, and since the dictionary and culture for millenia have defined marriage as between opposite genders, then it is the radical gay-power movement who is trying to impose their will on an unwilling culture.

    So, kindly, SHOVE the hell off.

  • Jaded

    nt

  • Diogenes314

    I honestly can’t understand why “the party of small government and individual responsibility” thinks they can tell everyone who they can marry and who they can’t.

    By the ‘party of small government’ you mean overwhelming majorities of the electorate crossing partisan lines? They think they can because of the silly assumption that when 60% of the populace votes for a referendum it becomes law. Personally I don’t care if you want to ‘marry’ a person of the same gender, your sibling, a farm animal or a cartoon character. As long as it is legal in the state you are in, and not just because some partisan hacks in robes created a non-existant ‘right’ for you to do so.

  • socallib

    access to federal tax benefits as well as access to a spouse’s social security payments and things like that. Not to mention it will inheritance law much easier: for example, if a person dies their partner has to pay an inheritance tax on the house, which a legally recognized spouse wouldn’t have to. There are good arguments that current “civil unions” hurt gay couples economically because they don’t get the same economic benefits that heterosexual marriages get.

    As for Doma, Obama campaigned on repealing it and replacing it with federal civil unions. Polls suggest strong support both for repealing Doma and for the institution of federally recognized marriages.

  • aaronbg

    it is my understand that all of those, except the marriage tax part, can be resolved by other legal contracts. Is this not true?

  • socallib

    First, the tax benefits to marriage are significant and, because of DOMA, no same sex couple can access their partner’s benefits upon their deaths such as social security medicare, etc. These are significant economic costs.

    There are over 1400 benefits that accrue to marriage that cannot be contracted for in other areas. These include: immigration and residency for partners from other countries, crime victims recovery benefits, domestic violence protection orders, judicial protections and immunity, automatic inheritance in the absence of a will, spousal veterans benefits, wrongful death benefits for surviving partner and children, bereavement or sick leave to care for partner or children, child support should a partnership dissolve, deferred compensation for pension and IRAs, welfare and public assistance.

    While some rights can be contracted for, such as next-of-kin status re: hospitals, the vast majority of benefits require the government to recognize the legal validity of a marriage. Or, it would require the government to grant the same benefits to civil unions as they do to marriage.

  • socallib

    If that’s true then every heterosexual marriage makes the government bigger too because there are more couples that the government recognizes. It doesn’t add new bureaucracies or result in the hiring of new civil servants.

    People who complain that the government imposes too many taxes should be in favor of gay marriage, however, since it would allow gays the same tax breaks and benefits that straight couples get. It would reduce the government’s ability to extract wealth from its gay citizens through taxation.

  • Aurelian

    You are exactly right. As with pretty much all social and cultural issues, the Left starts the fight, and then makes it extremely bitter with it’s tactic of having courts issue one ludicrous, constitutionally-bankrupt decision after another, and then they respond with righteous indignation when the other side dares to fight back.

    This is why the talk about the GOP using ‘wedge’ issues to ‘divide’ Americans is such crap, and why it’s so insulting. The Left/Dems try to impose gay marriage and abortion-on-demand via the courts. They insitute policies of racial/ethnic preferences. They pass anti-Second Amendment laws. And apparently in the world of the mainstream media, these are all somehow examples of unifying actions. But when conservatives fight back (and in many cases they are simply giving voice to what is the majority mainstream view of Americans), they are guilty of being ‘divisive.’

  • Aurelian

    Well, that would be very interesting if true. I’d be surprised if the public would really support overturning DOMA once all the issues involved are aired.

  • Aurelian

    The media let Obama get away with trying to have it all ways.

    He claims to be against gay marriage, for civil unions, and for letting the states decide.

    But of course the truth of the matter is that Obama’s judges will vote to strike down every traditional state marriage law in the nation, and impose in their place gay marriage/civil unions. Obama knows this. Most in the media know this. Anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to the judiciary knows this.

    Yet for some reason, Obama was never questioned about this obvious contradiction between what he claims to believe versus what his judges would do.

  • Aurelian

    It’s not like Obama made a big deal about his opposition to DOMA during the campaign.

    And his opposition to DOMA further shows how deceptive he is on this issue. If he really believes that the states should decide the matter (as he falsely claims), then why get rid of federal legislation that explicitly empowers them to do so?

  • Aurelian

    This idea that opposing gay marriage and supporting efforts to maintain the institution as it has always been somehow runs afould of small govt principles is absurd. Govt is made up of three branches afterall, and when one is acting in a renegade fashion by usurping power from the other branches and from the people to impose a leftwing social revolution w/o a shred of constitutional merit, then that is not in accoradance with small govt principles.

    It all comes down a to a judicial philosohpy. If you believe the nonsense that the Constitution somehow requires public recognition of same-sex unions, then you must also accept that private property can be taken for private use, that the Second Amendment protects some worthless collective right instead of an individual one, that enemy combatants should be given citizen-like status before the law, that there is a right to abortion on demand, that the death penalty is unconstitutional, that diversity is a compelling state reason to use racial preferences, and so on and so on.

  • socallib

    He doesn’t support gay marriage (I don’t him saying anything about leaving it to the states to decide – that was McCain).

    And Biden explicitly stated in the VP debate that there would be no legal difference between gay couples and heterosexual couples. It hardly caused a peep. Most polls suggest that people support federal unions even if they don’t support marriage itself.

  • socallib

    I’m not sure why all these beliefs necessarily entail one another. Leaving aside the issue of the courts, if the federal government repealed DOMA and instituted civil unions that would still not make government any bigger.

    I also reject that there is no constitutional merit for the courts to strike it down. In California, at least, the suit centers around whether the action prop 8 takes can be considered an amendment” as defined by California – and thus subject to the minimal threshold requirements that such amendments have – or whether the type of action that prop 8 proposes
    cannot be taken without “revising” the constitution, and thus passing the
    much more significant barriers that process entails.

    This has significant implications for the court’s ability to enforce equal rights protection across the board. This doesn’t just weaken state constitutional
    protection for gays, but for ALL Californians. Anyone’s rights can be
    subject to the proposition system or the vagaries of the state legislature.

    As for court cases in general, I listed a number of federal and state benefits that gay couples do not have access to because of DOMA – to me, that seems to be a fairly good case for an equal protection ruling. This isn’t about marriage per se, it’s about the rights that accrue to marriage.

  • socallib

    He supports repealing DOMA and federal civil unions. I also don’t see why it’s possible to be for civil unions and against marriage – that’s the position taken by the LDS.

  • Aurelian

    It seems like you are taking the mainstream media’s shameless bias in favor of Obama as some sort of proof of consistency on Obama’s part on this issue. The truth is that Obama tried to have it both ways, and he was allowed to do so.

    Obama did say that he supports civil unions and opposes DOMA — you are right about that — but he also said he personally opposes gay marriage and thinks states should decide for themselves about gay marriage. That was pretty much the position of every credible Democratic candidate. Of course if the media were fair (and if the GOP/McCain campaign were competent), then the contradictions of Obama’s position would have been clear to all.

    For example, why would Obama oppose the federal DOMA if he supports letting the states decide when that is precisely what the legilsation does?

    Moreoever, if he opposes gay marriage and supports civil unions, then why did he support the Calif Sup Court decision, which of course imposed gay marriage when they already had civil unions or domestic partnerships?

    And to what extent does his support for civil unions go? Does he believe that every state must have or recognize them? Should states that refuse to enact them be forced to do so by the courts?

    And of course Obama was never asked about the conflict between his phony support for letting the states decide versus the type of leftwing activist judges he will put on the courts; judges who will vote to strike down every traditional marriage law in the nation. No, he was never asked about that.

    Admittedly, this issue just didn’t have the punch this year that it had in 2004. The economy of course trumped all. And it may be that opinion has shifted left in four years, but it can also be argued that concern about the issue has faded with the passage of marriage amendments in over half the states. This may have created a false sense of security, and Obama and the media were not about to shatter that by telling the truth about the consequences of Obama’s judicial picks.

  • Aurelian

    Go back to what Obama was saying about DOMA early on, and what his campaign referenced this year. Hillary supported a repeal only of the part of DOMA which applied to federal law, while she supported the part about letting states refuse to recognize another state’s same-sex marriage. Obama supported a total repeal, but he made it clear that he thought that the state-empowering section of DOMA was unnecessary. He said that the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution DOES NOT require states to recognize another’s gay marriages. Basically, he argued that the provision is superfluous, and that states have and retain the authority to settle the issue of marriage for themselves without DOMA.

    At no point, has Obama ever said that states must adopt gay marriage or recognize them from another state.

    Whether or not Obama really believes that the states have the authority to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages from other states is hard to answer. Maybe as a legal scholar that is his honest opinion. I doubt it, but maybe it is. But what is not in doubt is how judges appointed by Obama will view the matter. Obama will appoint leftwingers like Souter, Ginsburg, Stevens, and Breyer, and they will have no regard whatsoever for states rights.

    The method they would use to impose gay marriage/civil unions on the entire nation remains in question. They may side-step the matter of the Full Faith and Credit Clause and instead choose some other part of the Constitution to abuse and twist beyond any meaning it was ever intended to have, or understood to have, to impose gay marriage.

    But it is clear that Obama never made the argument that states do not have a right to decide on gay marriage for themselves.

  • Aurelian

    If you follow court decisions at all, the logic is hard to argue with. Most judges follow a general judicial philosophy. None are pure, and none are perfectly consistent, but on social issues especially, most fall into a restrained/orignialist camp or an activist/living constitution camp. The same judges who would gut Second Amendment and property rights are the same ones who will vote to impose gay marriage/civil unions on the entire nation. I admit that this point is aimed more at center-right types who support gay marriage than it is you, because it is a fantasy to expect to find a judge who will be consistently liberal just on certain social issues, but then not so on everything else. Then Anthony Kennedys and Sandra Day O’Connors of the world will stab conservatives in the back on a lot more than abortion and gay marriage.

    As to California and whether or not Prop 8 is a true amendment; well, the Calif Sup Court are the ones who truly altered the constitution when they created a new right. All the people did was restore what had always been. The only right they took away was the phony one that the court created. All of the marriage-in-all-but-name rights of the Calif domestic partnership laws remain in effect.

    As to equal protection grounds; again, it all comes down to how one views the Constitution and how it should be interpreted. Nothing in the US Constitution (or likely in any state constitution either) was ever conceived of, intended to, or undertood as requiring the state to treat same-sex unions the same way it does traditional marriage. The people have never given consent to such an understanding. You have to believe in the Living Constitution theory, and the virtually unchecked power it gives to judges, to reach a different conclusion. I am an Originalist. You are a Living Constitutionalists. So on this we will never agree.