Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle waited until the last minute to veto a civil union bill, supposedly because she was contemplating it deeply. Judging from the stories on this, it looks like she was actually spending time cooking up lame excuses:
“It would be a mistake to allow a decision of this magnitude to be made by one individual or a small group of elected officials,” she said.
Representative democracy is just so damn controversial. Also, too: supermajority!
“I have been open and consistent in my opposition to same-sex marriage, and find that House Bill 444 is essentially same-sex marriage by another name.”
I thought the whole issue with the “sanctity of marriage” was that “marriage” is a sacred sacrament, we can’t force churches to marry gays, blah blah blah. I guess we’re down to the nub of it now: hating homos isn’t just for Sunday, it’s for everyday.
Finally, a big shout out to the Hawaii House of Representatives, which has a 45-6 Democratic majority, yet has chosen not to vote on a veto override.
Lysana
They’re still pissed about the whole rainbow flag thing, aren’t they? Geez, one university mascot who clearly predated the movement and people get their sarongs in a bunch.
Brian
Do you have to, do you have to, do you have to let in Lingle?
Cat Lady
You’d think that someone there would have noticed that here in Sodom, aka Massachusetts, the world has continued to turn, the divorce rate is the lowest in the nation, and there hasn’t been an epidemic of child molestation. Hating is the only explanation left, because there are no excuses.
edmund dantes
Let’s not forget getting lectured on the sanctity of marriage from someone that has violated the sanctity of marriage twice!!
Take it away Twice divorced Linda Lingle!!
None of this takes away from the fact that this sanctity of marriage argument is a crock of bullshit based upon revisionist history of marriage in this world. It just adds a delicious delicious layer of “STFU” to the assholes.
middlewest
So, if a popular referendum dissolved her marriage, she’d agree to it, right?
WereBear
It’s tough out there for the haters; there are fewer and fewer acceptable targets.
Except in their own twisted minds.
Keith
What…the…fuck? That’s not going to go too well for their tourism, methinks, unless they can get more Palins and less Obamas to bodyboard over there.
El Cid
Based on this
I’m sure conservatives like her would vehemently object when only 5 justices on the Supreme Court swept away decades old precedence and/or ruled in their favor on restricting marriage to heterosexuals only. After all, a decision of those magnitudes…
BeccaM
As ever, they retreat to their standard argument: “We want OUR religion to define the civil institution of marriage! Not anybody else’s.”
Adam Collyer
@Cat Lady:
Wait, wait, wait…you’re telling me the divorce rate for those God forsaken liberal Northerners is lower than the God fearin’, down home folks in Arkansas and Alabama?
Oh wait…would you look at that?
@Brian:
Totally brilliant. Needed a laugh this morning.
KCinDC
I’m not so outraged about not having a special session if they didn’t have the votes for the veto override:
What’s outrageous isn’t failing to call a special session but all those Democrats who voted against the bill in the first place.
MAJeff
So, we’ve got another Republican Governor being cynical, petty and cruel. Don Carcieri with funerary rights for same-sex couples and trans protection in hate crimes legislation, Pawlenty with health care and funerary rights, Lingle with Civil Unions…
The GOP is an anti-gay hate group.
KCinDC
Actually, let me modify that. We should be outraged about the Democrats who voted against the bill, but we should also be outraged about the Republicans who voted against it (and of course the Republican governor who vetoed it).
daveNYC
I guess the only thing worse than activist judges are activist legislators.
sparky
ummm…how about explaining how a non-vote here is worse than the “must give Obama a HCR victory” vote even though that bill was crap? in one case, bad non-vote due to political considerations; in the other, a vote for a bad thing due to political considerations. seems to me that the decisive ground in both cases is optics–arguments about perceptions, that is, rather than the substance of the policy to be voted upon. on that ground it seems difficult to fault them for not voting, though i agree that it silly (and cowardly) to not vote.
in case my point isn’t clear, it’s that if someone is going to make “optics” arguments as a ground FOR a particular vote, an “optics” argument is, necessarily, a good ground for a vote/action/non-action someone doesn’t like. i am not arguing in favor of consistency–i am arguing against the notion that optics should be the determinative ground in policy considerations, because that will necessarily generate irrational and counterproductive policy to the extent that those optics are grounded in irrational misperceptions. thus it generates an irrational inaction here and on the national front bad policy. it’s not possible to remove incoherence and irrationality from politics, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea to encourage it, either.
cue “hidden agenda” comments….
jrg
As soon as support for gay marriage hits 51%, we’ll get to hear about how Republicans have always been at the forefront of gay rights. When pressed, they will come up with an anti-gay Democrat to “prove” that the opposition was just as bad. I guarantee it.
daveNYC
I’m not sure about that. Even these days, the Republicans will bust out Abe to show that they don’t really hate black people, but I don’t see much effort to embrace modern civil rights. And that’s black people. When it comes to teh gheys, and the icky icky butt-sex, well, I can’t see their current base buying any message that doesn’t involve full-frontal demonization.
Bulworth
Yeah, that’s a pretty lame-ass “super-majority”.
Stefan
That’s not going to go too well for their tourism, methinks, unless they can get more Palins and less Obamas to bodyboard over there.
I went to Hawaii last year on vacation and loved it, was planning to go back. But no more. I won’t go back to that state on vacation until this is overturned.
Sentient Puddle
So…wait until next year when Abercrombie is likely to be governor and try again?
ibid
@sparky:
Except that no one (or almost no one) was actually saying HCR should be passed just for the optics. From what I saw, people who made the optics argument used it as a supporting argument to pass a bill that they thought was somewhere between “better than nothing” and ” the most important legislation passed in a generation”. And the optics weren’t just about giving Obama a win, they were about not having to bury health care for at least another decade. In other words, it wasn’t “a vote for a bad thing due to political considerations,” so you can’t compare it to a non-vote on a good thing due to political considerations (and it’s not clear that political considerations are the chief concern in this case either — if the politics of voting for civil unions was bad for them, why did they have the vote in the first place?). Obviously some people thought the bill was worse than nothing, but those people tended totake the “kill the bill” position rather than the “pass it to help Obama” position.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@daveNYC: And the beautiful thing is, for all the man-on-man buttsecks they get so agitated about, they very likely harbor aspirations of some backdoor action with their wife/girlfriend/designated sex worker. Or at the very least have viewed images of such acts on the intertrons.
DanF
Equality is so controversial.
Arclite
As a Hawaii resident, hearing this on the news yesterday was infuriating. We live in the most ethnically diverse state in the nation, with some of the lowest rates of ethnic strife and crime, one where the cultural attitudes are that of “aloha” to strangers as well as family and friends.
Right after she said this:
she said,
So basically, she’s going to have a ballot initiative and the LDS is going to spend millions of dollars in advertising telling how scary “TEH GAY” is and the ballot init will fail.
Great Fcking Leadership, all around.
Kyle
At least in this situation the bigoted governor betrays what the “pro-marriage” folks really feel. Be assured that they couldn’t give a flying damn about the sanctity of marriage; they never have. They hate gay folk. So if it’s ANY law that makes our lives easier or treats us as equal citizens, then they will be against it. The sanctity of marriage crap is just marketing.
I so damned tired of religion in this country. It is the very thing that holds us back. Look at every single civil rights advancement in this country, and you’ll see that we obtained that advancement only after we were able jettison the religious crap that we’ve saddled ourselves with.
Arclite
The people who hate gays aren’t Real Americans. Real Americans believe the principles on which this country were founded: equality before the law, the pursuit of happiness, freedom to assemble, etc. apply to everyone. Denying those things to any group for any reason is un-American.
Actually, the abolitionists were driven strongly by religious principles. However, in modern times, it seems that your axiom holds true fairly often. Funny that atheists are the least trusted group in our society.
crmjones
Morons.
Wouldn’t want large numbers of gays doing marriage/honeymoons in Hawaii and spending loads of money.
Uloborus
@sparky:
As stated above, the reason it’s different is because the HCR bill was a very, very good thing.
Kyle
@Arclite: Yes, Arclite, you’re correct about the abolitionists. And of course, the civil rights movement of the 40s through the 60s had many religious folk, as well, but the biggest obstacles have always been religious ones. Even slavery had its biblical justification. The bible is the “best” tool in a debate: questioning the bible is not permitted in polite society.
That brings up another point. I think folks fear the loss of religion because they fear the loss of “good christians,” i.e., those good folk, of many religious stripes, not just christians, who use religion to better folks lives: The Mother Theresas, MLKs, Dalai Lamas and the like. Of course, Mother Theresa would have been a saint, even if there were no religion to make her one. Good people will always be good people, regardless of whether they couch it in religion.
If only we’d worship the Constitution like some folks worship the bible, we’d be much better off.
Veritas78
If you’ve been divorced twice, you’re either a bad judge of character, a real asshole, or both.