posted
You all remember of course last spring when (to use the term that Samprimary coined) homomentum was in full swing and states were either passing SSM legislation or courts were ruling for it left and right. Main joined the frenzy, but because of a popular referendum rule in their constitution, the People's Veto can be enacted to strike down legislation signed by the governor.
Well next week Maine voters go to the polls to vote on the issue. Nate Silver at 538 seems to think it has a pretty good chance of passing. Polling is all over the place. I've read a few different polls from the last two weeks, one that has the veto that would ban the law as being ahead a few points, and a few more that show a dead heat.
Really, it could come down to two main things: turnout, and voter confusion. Who will actually come out for the measure? Will it be akin to 2008 turnout? That would probably assure a victory for gay rights advocates, but it's impossible to tell. The actual wording of the ballot measure is confusing as well. A "No" vote protects the law that was passed, and would create gay marriage, whereas a "Yes" vote would overturn it.
quote:"Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry and allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?"
That's the actual wording of the question. Analysts differ on how they believe people will react to the phrasing of the question. Some believe that it benefits gay rights advocates, as people tend to vote no when they either don't know, or oppose something, without taking the time to read it. Others suggest that a "Yes" vote is often linked with the idea of changing something, thus people will vote yes thinking they are in fact upholding the new law when they'd be voting it down. That also throws into question the validity of the polling data.
We'll see next week for sure.
And in other news: Hearings start today on the issue of legalizing SSM in Washington DC. The hearings are expected to last several days. Also, New York and New Jersey have expressed their intent to introduce SSM legislation before the end of the year. And one more thing, a federal court will hear a case to have Prop 8 in California overturned, based on the idea that it violates the equal protection clause of the US Constitution. It would have been thrown out, but the attorney in favor of the ban could not adequately articulate how gay marriage harms traditional marriage, so the judge kicked it upstairs. The case will be heard in January.
quote:A "No" vote protects the law that was passed, and would create gay marriage, whereas a "Yes" vote would overturn it.
In many circumstances, this alone would be enough to keep the measure safe. Plenty of voters doof language in their heads and default to "no" and they trend to doing this more and more often in the later questions in the ballot due to mental fatiguing. You could easily get a 2% voting shift towards 'no' this way, so I'd be pretty confident in the passage of this bill unless the anti-SSM crowd in maine turned out to have a lead in excess of the MoE.
Part of this confidence is because progressives tend to be more read up on the issues and for whatever other reasons aren't as thrown by confusing wording.
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quote:allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?
But here is where the anti-gay marriage folks get the upper hand.
Does the Maine law require individuals and religious groups to perform those marriages? If so it breaks the Separation of Church & State. No church should or could be required to marry someone they don't believe should be married. That's why you find few Catholics getting married by a Rabbi.
So I assume that the law, as stands, does not require religious groups to be forced to marry gay couples. Yet this veto question implies that it does, and that the only way from saving your church from having to perform gay weddings is to vote Yes.
Seems like someone is "Bearing False Witness" to me.
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quote:allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?
But here is where the anti-gay marriage folks get the upper hand.
Does the Maine law require individuals and religious groups to perform those marriages? If so it breaks the Separation of Church & State. No church should or could be required to marry someone they don't believe should be married. That's why you find few Catholics getting married by a Rabbi.
So I assume that the law, as stands, does not require religious groups to be forced to marry gay couples. Yet this veto question implies that it does, and that the only way from saving your church from having to perform gay weddings is to vote Yes.
Seems like someone is "Bearing False Witness" to me.
I think it pretty clearly says that you can refuse to perform such a marriage if you don't want to do it.
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posted
Maine and Washington went to the polls today on gay marriage. Results later, as they become available.
Lots of other "big" elections today, though frankly I think most of them are extremely overblown. VA and NJ are not national representations of what people think of either Democrats or Obama. NJ is in many cases a national outlier, and Virginia state politics have been in flux for some time now. Perhaps that one could signal some sort of trend away from liberals, but the whole "referendum on Obama" stuff is melodramatic sensationalist news. What a surprise.
More gay news as it becomes available.
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posted
Yeah I saw that, and it looks like they took all the big spots in VA, as well as governor in NJ.
It's neck and neck in the NY-23 between the Dems and the Conservative Party.
From what I've read, the last update had 22% reporting, and 50.6% voted to keep the law. Doesn't get much more neck and neck than that.
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quote:allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?
But here is where the anti-gay marriage folks get the upper hand.
Does the Maine law require individuals and religious groups to perform those marriages? If so it breaks the Separation of Church & State. No church should or could be required to marry someone they don't believe should be married. That's why you find few Catholics getting married by a Rabbi.
So I assume that the law, as stands, does not require religious groups to be forced to marry gay couples. Yet this veto question implies that it does, and that the only way from saving your church from having to perform gay weddings is to vote Yes.
Seems like someone is "Bearing False Witness" to me.
I think it pretty clearly says that you can refuse to perform such a marriage if you don't want to do it.
I didn't know rabbis don't believe Catholics should be married.
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Looks like it's starting to turn, but I don't have nearly enough information on either what precincts are reporting in, what is left, and what the demographics are of those areas to even hazard a guess on what's to come.
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Reports are that half of all registered voters took place in the election. That's a pretty good turnout for an off-year.
Proponents of same-sex marriage are down by about 30,000 votes, and it doesn't look like they'll be able to close the gap with the remaining precincts. Looks like the people's veto will be enacted.
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posted
Interestingly enough, the poll mechascientists I was watching called it again (PPP studying the urban-rural divide).
I previously thought the defense against the veto was pretty ironclad until I looked at the mechanisms that drive people to vote in these elections, and why they would favor an overturning should the turnout grow excessively high.
The phenomenon is that feelings about gay marriage have traditionally been much stronger on the right than the left: with most moderate voters, a gay marriage issue doesn't get you off your butt to vote. But for the more right wing anti-gay voters, a gay marriage issue on the ballot packs you into the voting booth with great regularity. And since Maine is a little bit behind the curve in the country's progressive tilt towards gay-friendly policies as time goes on (the 'homomentum' I described) that would make this outcome theoretically inevitable should the turnout be reinforced along these lines.
posted
I think in the homomentum, it is interesting to note that a major city in Texas will most likely have an openly gay mayor (runoff election in a month, but she got the majority of the first vote). And while Houston had a Dem mayor before, openly gay mayor in Texas is saying something. Living in Texas really has not given me the best overall impression of Texas.
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quote:Originally posted by Juxtapose: That second graph is the one that says it all, in my opinion.
I'm actually a little surprised that the numbers are so low in even the most progressive places. At least in my personal experience (which is bent by living in liberal areas of northern California), support for gay marriage is practically universal among young people, and particularly college students or recent graduates. How many of those people fall into the "explicit" support category is uncertain, but (again at least for me and my liberal area) gay marriage wasn't ever even a subject of debate- support was a given. Though I had many class mates and friends in college who were some form of evangelical Christian, even many of them were in favor of broad reform in favor of gay rights- in fact I don't now recall meeting anyone in college who wasn't in favor of such reform, nor do I recall any classmates or friends from childhood who were strongly opinionated about the issue either for or against. We all seemed to treat it as a non-issue. It's one of those weird things for me- I don't *think* I'm sheltered or underexposed to the breadth of opinion or belief out there, but I struggle now to recall a single person I've ever met personally who expressed any view other than favorable towards the expansion of gay legal rights. From traditional Christians, catholic school teachers, muslims, jews, athiests, and people from dozens of countries- I can't recall a single one that ever expressed a negative attitude toward it. Hmm.
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posted
Orincoro- as an LDS Texan, I can think of many people under 29 that are very negative towards SSM. But considering the way my district votes (Tom Delay), it would be more surprising if I didn't know someone who believed that way.
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posted
Sure, I am totally credulous of the fact that you know such people. I am quite surprised that I really don't.
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posted
I dunno, cross referencing with Canadian polls, we seem to be roughly in the same neighbourhood as Massachusetts and Vermont, roughly 45% in favour four years ago and 61% now.
That said, I have encountered a few people that are against, but the subject doesn't really come up often.
They were born-again Christian Chinese though, so a bit of a special case since they seem to take it (religion) pretty seriously.
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posted
You can take religion seriously without being against SSM. You can take religions seriously and rejoice in SSM. I know you didn't say you couldn't, I just wanted to nip that implication in the bud. You can also take religion seriously, believe that God does not approve of homosexuality and still believe that the government should be making that call.
Also, I am delighted that I live in a place where I pretty much have to go to the internet to find people under 60 who are against SSM.
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They picked more conservative variants of Christianity, took those seriously, and it seemed to me at least that that was the main motivation for the stance. As examples of seriousness, one became a Catholic nun in South America and some are interested in missionary work. So a far cry from the relatively harmless WASP Christians that I generally grew up with that didn't take it very seriously.
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posted
Again, you seem to be characterizing religious people who are pro-SSM as "relatively harmless WASP Christians...who didn't take it very seriously." I am telling you that I know ardent, fierce Christians - Protestant and Catholic and Muslim and Jewish, nuns and priests, and ministers as well as lay people - who are pro-SSM. Who see this as a social justice issue.
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posted
My husband is a very devout Catholic who takes his religion very seriously, even passionately, and somehow manages to be pro-SSM.
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posted
I realize that - and acknowledged it. It is a point, though, that is often lost and I want to be sure it is made.
Christine, I am baffled by people who take Christianity seriously and aren't pro-SSM. I understand them in theory, but it is difficult to get my head around.
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posted
Slow edit: I would also note that I've previously posted an analysis of the Proposition 8 exit polls which showed that despite the media attention paid to ethnicity, it turned out to be pretty irrelevant. It turned out that what looked like differences in voting patterns between ethnic groups was simply differences in level of religious practice and this when controlled, pretty much eliminated ethnic group as a predictor of how people would vote.
In fact, level of religious practice was one of the best predictors overall.
That said, this observation in no way precludes the existence of strongly religious people that vote the other way.
ex: It is highly probable that if I order a double double at Tim Horton's, I will get two creams and two sugars. However, this does not contradict the possibility that I will in fact get a donut (nor does it contradict my experience of always getting a coffee).
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posted
Actually, it's not difficult at all for me to understand why a Christian wouldn't be pro-SSM. There is after all textual evidence supporting (though not, in my opinion, to the point of ending the discussion obviously) that stance.
What's more difficult for me to wrap my head around by a wide margin are the folks who, so far as I can tell, take America 'seriously' (to use Mucus's term) but oppose SSM. Because to me, 'stay out of life as much possible, @#$%in' gubmint!' is much more fundamental towards the idea of America than that notion is to Christianity.
I can still understand it, but it takes a lot more stepping outside of my own head to reach that understanding.
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posted
Rakeesh, they've spun it in their own heads this way: "Unless we stop 'em, the gubmint's gonna force us to put up with gay sex!" So they still see it as a freedom issue: it's freedom from having to see couples they don't want.
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posted
Heh. Well, no, not really Tom. Because after all, we all already are 'forced' to 'put up with' these couples. Not a crime for two dudes to be kissin' on a park bench after all, just like it's no crime for a dude and a lady. And only the most hysterical of the hysterically opposed want the government to do something about that, and I try at least to make it a point not to give those folks much consideration.
No, to me the disconnect lies in the idea that, as Americans, just because we have the right to vote our religion means that we should, as Americans, actually do so. My own personal religion has no place in the voting booth for anything short of things as bad as, say, murder.
That's why I can understand someone opposing legalized abortion in a way I can't understand them opposing legalizing SSM. I mean, if one thinks someone is being killed, there's an obvious duty both as a human being in general and as an American in particular to step in-in this case, in the voting booth.
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quote:That's why I can understand someone opposing legalized abortion in a way I can't understand them opposing legalizing SSM.
Which makes the position of the LDS church all the stranger. They have clearly advocated for anti-SSM legislation, while their policy on advocacy for abortion legislation is "The Church has not favored or opposed legislative proposals or public demonstrations concerning abortion." They are officially neutral on the subject.
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posted
Makes sense to me. Reasonable Mormons might be lured into supporting SSM if the Church doesn't strongly come out against it. They don't have the same problem with abortion, so why get in the way?
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quote:Originally posted by scholarette: I think in the homomentum, it is interesting to note that a major city in Texas will most likely have an openly gay mayor (runoff election in a month, but she got the majority of the first vote). And while Houston had a Dem mayor before, openly gay mayor in Texas is saying something. Living in Texas really has not given me the best overall impression of Texas.
The first openly gay owner of a major league baseball team can go on the list.
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quote:Originally posted by jebus202: Makes sense to me. Reasonable Mormons might be lured into supporting SSM if the Church doesn't strongly come out against it. They don't have the same problem with abortion, so why get in the way?
Except their efforts haven't been just directed at members of their church. They've asked them to actively campaign to convince other people (non-Mormons) to support their position. They've also provided official and unofficial support to individual campaigns. Their goal was clearly legislation, not the hearts and minds of their own membership.
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posted
LDS officially think that a woman can pray to God and be told an abortion is the right choice. Which, I believe, puts us into the pro-choice camp. If you believe God will tell a woman it is the right choice, then said choice should be legal. Prophets have flat out said abortion is not murder. Whereas, our doctrine regarding family in modern days lacks ambiguity.
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quote:Originally posted by scholarette: LDS officially think that a woman can pray to God and be told an abortion is the right choice. Which, I believe, puts us into the pro-choice camp. If you believe God will tell a woman it is the right choice, then said choice should be legal. Prophets have flat out said abortion is not murder. Whereas, our doctrine regarding family in modern days lacks ambiguity.
If God can tell a woman that abortion is the right choice, then why can't he tell a woman that a lesbian relationship is the right choice?
quote:If God can tell a woman that abortion is the right choice, then why can't he tell a woman that a lesbian relationship is the right choice?
Who can say? Though some potentially satisfactory answers do come to mind: issues of health, for example. And not just in the case of medically foreseen problems, either.
Anyway, the question isn't, for religious people, "Could God tell a woman that a lesbian relationship is the right choice," but rather, "Would (or did) God tell etc. etc." Folks opposed to legalizing SSM on religious grounds clearly believe the answer to the second question is an emphatic, unequivocal, "No."
But that still has no place in the voting booth. None whatsoever. Unless one also thinks God has said, "Hey, forget about all that free will business."
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quote:I'm highly dubious of this claim. What official statement or publication do you get this from?
quote:Abortion is a most serious matter and should be considered only after the persons involved have consulted with their local church leaders and feel through personal prayer that their decision is correct.
posted
It is in the bishop's manual. And if you want to search the LDS webpage, it is there somewhere. But I am being lazy right now (supposedly doing my nanowrimo writing, but spending way too much time goofing off). You are supposed to meet with your bishop and counsel over it and you need a good reason (rape, incest, health and mental problems- specifically not to be used as birth control). This was a big topic of conversation in my ward about 5 years ago when a woman had quads and refused to selectively abort.
ETA- or what MattP said.
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