quote of the day, or, rick santorum & what he wants to do to his mother-in-law (& other news from the marriage wars)

"Is anyone saying same-sex couples can't love each other? I love my children. I love my friends, my brother. Heck, I even love my mother-in-law. Should we call these relationships marriage, too?"
-Rick Santorum, intellectual giant

Rick, dear, if you feel about your kids and your mother-in-law the same way that two gay men wanting to get married feel about each other, well, you've got even more problems than I thought you did when you merely got booted out of office back in 2006.

In other, more sane, news, Adam Liptak of the Times seems inclined to believe that gay-marriage opponents will be hard-pressed to stop Governor Patterson's recent directive to all New York State agencies to comply with a February appellate court ruling that the state must fully recognize gay marriages performed in other jurisdictions.

But then, of course, there's the ongoing uproar that the California Supreme Court, in its commitment to equality and justice, instigated recently with its ruling allowing gay marriage. Not only are the conservatives up in arms in California proper, but now 10 attorneys general from other states have petitioned to stop California gay marriages from going into effect until after the November election, at which point Californians will have the opportunity to vote to return to their pre-enlightenment days of injustice.

I'm putting my money on gay rights, though, at least in California. Not only has the Terminator himself come out in favor of gay marriage, but a recent Field Poll indicates that for the first time more Californians support gay marriage than oppose it. And as California Attorney General Jerry Brown so succinctly put it, "Same-sex marriage is a deeply contentious issue, but in California the matter has now been resolved by the state Supreme Court."

Back in New York, on the one hand we've got James Dobson's Alliance Defense Fund for some reason threatening to sue Governor Patterson over his directive and yet on the other hand we've got Republican senate majority leader Joseph Bruno saying, "I don’t care whether they’re gay, black, white, Oriental, whatever. Equal justice. That’s what it’s all about."

And speaking of the Alliance Defense Fund, the LA Times ran a series recently, a week-long debate between Glen Lavy (a top lawyer for the ADF) and Jon Davidson (Lamda Legal's legal director). Makes for fascinating reading, well worth the time, if you're interested in such things.

One thing I like to keep in mind, especially when I'm feeling particularly frustrated about this stuff, is that those who oppose equal rights really are on the losing side. Whether they lose now, or in a decade, or in several decades, they are already losing. Polls consistently show that more and more young people support equality, and eventually, inevitably, those young people are going to take over the country. And there's not a damned thing that the Rick Santorums and the James Dobsons of the world can do about that.