Jim's Daily Outrage

More from The Green Knight:

The NYT:

About 50 prominent religious leaders, including seven Roman Catholic cardinals and about a half-dozen archbishops, have signed a petition in support of a constitutional amendment blocking same-sex marriage.

That would make, oh, several thousand religious leaders in the United States who are not calling for any such thing, including many who would be dead set opposed to any such measure. Of course, you'll never hear about them from the corporate media. They could all get together and scream at the top of their lungs, write their message in neon letters ten feet high, and still they'd get completely ignored, while Anderson Cooper interviewed Jerry Falwell on the issue (again). But to continue:

Organizers of the petition said it was in part an effort to revive the groundswell of opposition to same-sex marriage that helped bring many conservative voters to the polls in some pivotal states in 2004.

Let me get this straight. The war in Iraq is turning into a fiasco of epic proportions, Afghanistan is beginning to destabilize again, there's serious talk about dropping nuclear bombs on Iran, the city of New Orleans is still a disaster area, the price of gasoline is racing towards the stratosphere, the number of Americans living in poverty is on the rise, the immigration issue is turning into a huge battleground,
the housing bubble is about to burst, the federal budget is an absolute wreck...

And all these people can get worked up about is how much they can't stand gay people. And it's not even a serious measure, just voter manipulation:

No one expects the measure to pass this year. But drives to amend state constitutions to ban same sex-marriage proved powerful incentives to turning out conservative voters in Ohio and elsewhere in 2004.

Un. Be. Lievable. They neither expect nor even really want it to pass. It's just cheap electioneering. And it gets even better when you contemplate the likely results:

A Pew Research poll in March found that 51 percent of the public opposed legalizing same-sex marriage, down from 63 percent in February 2004.

Another fifty-fifty culture war split at the polls. Great. Just what the USA doesn't need.

For the record, whatever your religious views or lack thereof, there's one outstandingly good reason to oppose any such measure: Restricting the behavior of citizens is not what the Constitution is for. The US Constitution has one function only: to define and set limits to the
powers of the federal government. That's all it does. Try to find any restrictions on citizen action in the US Constitution; they aren't there. Even murder and theft aren't forbidden by the Constitution. To restrict people's right to do something as harmless as getting married, and by a constitutional amendment, is just ridiculous.