Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Check out the new MassEquality video

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Last weekend, MassEquality premiered our new documentary video, “Better Angels,” at House Parties all across the state. It’s now up on our website — check it out at: http://www.massequal…

This documentary film, which is being sent to all Massachusetts legislators, shows what happened just two years ago in Wisconsin, when supporters of equality lost a campaign to prevent a similar discriminatory anti-gay amendment from being written into the Wisconsin Constitution.

Please check it out, and forward it to your family & friends!

Please share widely!
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Comments

    • I agree: perfectly crafted 12 minute video.

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      Question: Can any of the Beacon Hill people explain how often State Reps and Senators actually view the various videos given to them? 

      • would bring a laptop to their meeting with their legislator and watch it together.  /hint hint!/

  2. This is a fantastic video.  I dearly hope that our legislators take the hard lesson learned by Wisconsin and Ohio, and Michigan, and Hawai’i, and Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, ALabama, Georgia, Virginia and South Carolina, and realize that another legislative vote to advance the amendment means certain death to a minority group’s access to civil marriage.

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    I have straight friends who really want a popular vote on this amendment so that they can feel good about voting against it.  Based on that list of state above, they make the [poor, IMO] assumption that the amendment will be handily defeated. 

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    The only state to vote down one of these anti-LGBT, anti-equality amendments was AZ.  How did it happen there?  Straight senior citizens were scared into thinking that the way the thing was worded, they would lose some rights.  It failed because straight people took it personally and seriously.  This will not be the case in MA.  No straight people are directly affected by the MA hate amendment because their personal access to civil marriage will remain intact regardless. 

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    Also, most straight people are ambivalent at best about LGBT people & LGBT civil rights, and by and large will not be (certainly have not been!) motivated to campaign or vote against the amendment.  This is true even amongst some of my friends, who remain maddeningly ignorant of the process even with consistent discussion by me.  I know it will be hard for some activists on this site to comprehend, but most straight people are not like you!  They do not care enough about this issue to do what needs doing at any stage, and this spells a win for VoteOnAnyone’sButMyMarriage in a popular election.  VOM will have their people out there voting, because they have one of the best motivators there is driving their effort: hate.  Hate and self-rightousness and a deliberate misunderstanding about who LGBT people are.

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    Finally, I say to my straight friends and legislators, it is extremely cruel to play craps with someone else’s civil rights, when your own civil rights are not also on the chopping block.  If the people affected by the amendment say DON’t LET IT GET TO A POPULAR VOTE, who are others to insist otherwise? 

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    The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution promises equal protection of the laws.  I hope that our legislators will honor the US Constitution and that promise, and stop the amendment dead in its tracks.

    • I’m ambivalent on this matter. I don’t care one way or the other. That being said, you start calling me a bigot and a hater and some of your other choices of words in personal attacks on any who disagrees with you and I may just take up the cause for the other side. I despise being labelled by someone who doesn’t even know me.

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      People who have an axe to grind, representing whatever ilk, are often the first to project their own “hate” on to others.

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      This same sex marriage thing is a double edged sword. Many people empathize with the plight of the gay and lesbian folks but are fearfull of the road it is leading down.

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      If you want to deep six your cause keep accusing folks of being biggots.

      • then you realize I don’t call ambivalent people bigots and haters.  I call them ambivalent. 

        • If supporting discrimination doesn’t make someone a bigot or hater, well, I’m fairly sure nothing does.

      • Aren’t you the one who said:

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        Talk about being a biggot!  (0.00 / 0)
        Out of the mouths of babes!
        by: MCRD @ Wed Apr 11, 2007 at 16:52:57 PM EDT

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        I would take your foot out of your mouth, then shut it.

  3. Just like a liberal is not a “progressive”

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    second – this speakes volumes

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    “This is true even amongst some of my friends, who remain maddeningly ignorant of the process even with consistent discussion by me”

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    they remain ignorant of your spin on the process – which is a good thing.

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    you have a nerve to call people hateful – another spin term along with “bigot” that loses you millions of supporters.

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    lastly, the only way you can change votes after all this harassment is to either pay them off, or bribe them or threaten them with loss of funding – which is what it looks like MassEquality is desperatly trying to do now.

    • when it seeks to minimize the number of couples who can marry.  straight people still can and do marry – marriage hasn’t changed for them one iota.  why the fuss?

    • Yeah, the same way gun control laws aren’t anti-gun, they’re pro-life.

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    • but a petition that takes away existing marriage rights is accurately described as “anti-marriage.”  Full stop.

          1. Do you agree that the petition is anti-marriage in MA?

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          2. How can it be “pro-marriage” to preemptively ban marriage between certain categories of consenting adults?

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          You can take any position you want on these petitions, but don’t pretend that they’re anything but anti-marriage. By supporting them, you’re saying that you don’t think certain people should be allowed to get married.  Sounds pretty anti-marriage to me.

          • Mother cannot marry a son. Brother cannot marry sister.
            First cousins cannot marry. An individual cannot marry an “idiot” (whatever that means). Personally I find these limitations and sanctions repugnant and distasteful, morally and ethically abhorrent and a violation of my rights as a human being. By virtue of my humanity I should be entitled to marry any human being I so desire. it’s no ones business but mine. I’m with Laurel. STOP violating my rights. Ones good for one individual is good for everyone. Laurel’s logic is right on the mark.

    • Here is a quote that I dug up of his from knowthyneighbor.org. The thread is dicussing a victim fund for those injured by homophobic Jacob Robida’s attack at a gay bar in New bedford:

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      PARANOIA – THE DESTROYER

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      Posted by: Paul Jamieson | February 10, 2006 at 06:46 AM

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      I don’t think I need comment further.

      • The comment was in response to Hosty and others assertion that gays were being murdered everyday everywhere by bigots like me who sign petitions to protect traditional marriage and dare stand up to the fools over at Know Thy Nieghbor who like to harass people.

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        Actually – the rest of the lyric fits you Hosty

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        “Well I fell asleep then i woke feelin kind of queer, Lola looked at me and said man you look so wierd. She said man there’s really something wrong with you – some day you’re gonna self destruct!”

        • Who is obsessed with what my neighbor does with his penis. Back under the rock Paul, nobody buys your BS.

          • Keep framing the argument like that and all you do is help our siide. I have missed going toe to toe with you since they banned me from KTN. I’m not sure how long I will last here, but anyway here goes;

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            If I remember the discussion, it was typical of your side blaming the murder on existing attitudes towards gays.  I countered that Robida was a lunatic and not representative of the population at all. I called you paranoid and insensitive to try to spin that horrendous event as indicative of the petition signers.

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            Why are you and Tom Lang so obsessed with me John? Why would you go to great lengths to publish my name and address on the web and then allow people on your blog to threaten my family. Yes, I was threatened by a blogger named Joe S and a couple of others. You personally gave out my phone number and told people to call and harass me. I received magazines for months and book club memberships after that fiasco.

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            So please, do not let the good folks here at Blue Mass think you are some saint.

            • You have NOT been banned from KnowThyNeighbor.  And Boo-Hoo about the magazine subscriptions.  Welcome to the world of public debate and activism.  We ALL receive stupid magazine subscriptions but some of us also get telephone calls from the KKK and “exotic dancers” sent to our houses in the middle of the night.

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              When I look back years from now, the “dancers” prank will be very laughable, not because they were sent to my (a gay man’s) house, but for the conversation I had when I reported this to the police.  It was priceless…The Manchester-by-the-Sea Police Sergeant, “So, you want me to open a file that you are reporting that ‘someone’ sent 3 exotic dancers to your house at 1 in the morning and you told them that you didn’t want them?”  Me, “umm yes officer…”  LOL

        • My biggest regret at KnowThyNeighbor was that we did not place enough emphasis on contacting ALL the signers of that nasty petition.

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          I was too busy dealing with the mayhem caused by the fraud and forgery as well as the really badly thought out MassEquality attacks on us to give 110% to the personal activism part.

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          But rest assured that KTN will never take the names off of our website.

  4. So you censor my posting of the black clergy in Boston denouncing gay marriage

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    Thank you – this illustrates perfectly why you will continue to lose

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    Your head is in the sand

    • That is funny. Anti-marriage forces are desperately trying to hang on to one-quarter of our legislature here. Everyone else says move along.

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      I do love this state.

    • why your comments were taken down: they were, in my sole and unreviewable judgment, Rules violations.

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      Insults, personal  attacks, rudeness, and blanket unsupported statements reduce the level of discourse, interfere with our basic objective, and are not permitted.

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      Your comments contained numerous “blanket unsupported statements” — including the one with the article about the black clergy.  Obviously, the clergy does not speak for the entire “black community,” nor do the clerics quoted in that article speak for the entire black clergy.  And your repeated assertions about all the courts that supposedly made assertions about children being raised by same-sex couples contained not a single link.

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      And yes, I’m holding your comments to a higher standard than I sometimes hold other contributors.  This is a lefty site.  Deal.

      • It is about time BMG starts spraying for trolls before it is overrun with mean spirited nastys, soley here to get their thrills via flaming others. We need to be able to disagree, but within the rules of civilized society.

      • Your entire party and movement is based on “blanket unsupported statements”

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        as long as YOU are reading these David, you can censor all you want

        • since this statement:

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          Your entire party and movement is based on “blanket unsupported statements”

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          is obviously a blanket unsupported statement (and is also demonstrably false).  But that’s too meta for me.  So I’ll just leave it up and chuckle.

      • I think that Mr. Jamieson’s argument that courts find that children are better raised by biological parents comes from a 2001 NYTimes article:  Blain Hardin, 2-Parent Families Rise After Change in Welfare Laws, N.Y. TIMES, Aug. 12, 2001.

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        a powerful consensus has emerged in recent years among social scientists. . . . It sees single-parent families as the dismal foundries that produced decades
        of child poverty, delinquency, and crime . . . . From a child’s point of view, according to a growing body of social research, the most supportive household is one with two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage.

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        The article doesn’t address gay couples, but rather favors biological parents. 

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        I’m also aware that Gary Becker (can I disagree with someone who has more Nobel Prizes than me?) has publicly stated that he is persuaded that children raised by two gays or lesbians do worse than children raised by heterosexual parents.

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        I think the more dispassionate claim is this: Courts traditionally favor the married, biological parents as the custodial parents, and probably courts haven’t had an opportunity to rule on very many, if any, situation where child custody has become an issue for a gay couple.

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