How we single handedly defeated the FMA!

The time is here. You can almost smell it. It is an election year and it is time for the GOP to pull out all the stops and get people on board with the right-wing agenda. Using sophisticated scientific evaluation and well known fact, the GOP has concluded that the best way to get any group to do what you want them to do is to make them afraid. If I was Karl Rove and I had this information, I would probably dress a couple of guys in hockey masks, give them a couple of chainsaws, and have them chase people to the polls. But that's why the GOP didn't hire me…that and my gambling problem. But Karl and the GOP are more manipulative and crafty than I am. They are probably not more creative, or prettier, but definitely craftier. They decided to play at the very thing that people in the middle of America are most afraid of...Gays. Well, gays and immigrants, but today class, we are gonna focus on today’s reappearance of the Federal Marriage Amendment on the Senate schedule.

I don't pretend to know everything about the GOP or their strategy for America. Frankly, that information would probably make me too angry, and take up valuable space in my brain usually reserved for Celebrity Gossip and 1980's TV sitcom trivia. In fact, Scooter is the expert about the links between fear and people's political affiliations (Republicans in general are afraid of death...at least I think I understand his research correctly...he's the valedictorian with the PhD, I made up my own honor society so my family wouldn't know I was the only Biology major who didn't get into one). So I should probably leave that stuff to him, but he's busy, so I'm tackling this for now. Every good motivation can be distilled down to fear. Greed is simply the fear of being poor. If you are motivated by love, you are afraid of loss.

So what is it that the opponents of gay marriage are so afraid of? That is the million dollar question and the conclusion I have come to is that even THEY don’t know what it is they are afraid of. The answers we so often hear are that it threatens families, it harms children, and it targets the very foundation of our society. But if you try to dig a little further and ask "Uh, how?" there is never an answer, just more vague statements about polygamy and pedophilia (both of which are completely unrelated to gay people or their marriages).

I guess when it comes down to it, there doesn't have to be any real threat to make people scared and that is why the FMA showed up on the Senate schedule again today. They bring it up to remind the middle of America that there is a beast out there, and they will continue to fight the good fight to bring that beast down. It is also a really good bait and switch. If they are busy fighting the gay marriage monster that threatens families and eats children, nobody asks why they aren’t busy figuring out a solution to the little problem we call Iraq, cleaning up the gulf coast, slowing down global warming, improving our schools, feeding our poor, and etc., etc., etc. So thank you to the US Senate for wasting a day trying to write bigotry into the constitution a day where you could have done something to make the world a little better.

Oh, and I bet you are wondering how Scooter and I single-handedly stopped the FMA. The answer is we didn’t have to. It was never going to pass anyway.