"homophobic activism is ever more depopulated and isolated as well as brain-dead"

We can hope, Mr. Rich. Brain dead and depopulated does not mean that hate has become love or even neutrality. About this take a look at Judith Warner's Dude, You’ve Got Problems.

More from Frank Rich's The Bigots’ Last Hurrah:

The Obamas’ dog had longer legs on cable than the news from Iowa and Vermont. CNN’s weekly press critique, “Reliable Sources,” inquired why. The gay blogger John Aravosis suggested that many Americans are more worried about their mortgages than their neighbors’ private lives. Besides, Aravosis said, there are “only so many news stories you can do showing guys in tuxes.”

As the polls attest, the majority of Americans who support civil unions for gay couples has been steadily growing. Younger voters are fine with marriage. Generational changeover will seal the deal. Crunching all the numbers, the poll maven Nate Silver sees same-sex marriage achieving majority support “at some point in the 2010s.”

Iowa and Vermont were the tipping point because they struck down the right’s two major arguments against marriage equality. The unanimous ruling of the seven-member Iowa Supreme Court proved that the issue is not merely a bicoastal fad. The decision, written by Mark Cady, a Republican appointee, was particularly articulate in explaining that a state’s legalization of same-sex marriage has no effect on marriage as practiced by religions. “The only difference,” the judge wrote, is that “civil marriage will now take on a new meaning that reflects a more complete understanding of equal protection of the law.”

Rich mentions Stephen Colbert's video and it is worth watching. Stephen Colbert probably did more to demolish the homophobes than all of our serious discussions. Sorry, could not get it to embed - go give it a look.

Follow up on The Iowa Same-Sex Marriage Decision is Not Anti-Democratic

Please read Don Sherfick's Iowa's impact on Indiana: my heart versus my head from Indiana Equality:

Besides, all this stuff about the “tyranny of an unelected activist judiciary” as the reason for a constitutional amendment is just so much disingenuous baloney (you won’t find that term in Black’s Law Dictionary). Once upon a time those pushing a prior version of their proposed amendment loudly claimed that it definitely wouldn’t keep the General Assembly from enacting civil unions. Now, although they’ve gone to great lengths to avoid pointing it out, their new measure would stop a popularly elected set of lawmakers from passing such legislation or anything near it.

Read My Lips: It AIN’T just about judges…that’s a convenient and misleading slogan…..what they really want is do is make it nearly impossible for future Hoosiers, already changing in their attitudes, to work the popular will concerning the civil rights of gay and lesbian couples. “The times, they are a changing”, and those who take upon themselves to permanently enshrine what they consider “God’s will” into the state’s highest legal document are getting frantic.

Positive Liberty and Civil Unions

The blog Positive Liberty has a very short, interesting post titled Civil Unions for All. The post is in a dialog format. I assume that with Eric Miller prowling the corridors of the Statehouse any such reasonable compromise is out in Indiana.

INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS

Have I really spent the day reading the Sunday Book Review in the New York Times? I am starting to realize that may be the case. One last one to take a look at: INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS. Considering the continuing tale of same-sex marriage in Indiana, I suggest checking out the review and the book.

Hunt, the Eugen Weber professor of modern European history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a distinguished expert on 18th-century France, says that “human rights require three interlocking qualities: rights must be natural (inherent in human beings), equal (the same for everyone) and universal (applicable everywhere).” This conception of human rights, she explains, had its origins in the Western Enlightenment of the 18th century. Although the English had issued a Bill of Rights in 1689, that document derived from the particularities of English law and English history and did not declare the equality, universality or naturalness of rights. It was left to Thomas Jefferson and the American Congress in 1776 to issue the first notable human rights proclamation. But it was the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 that had the greatest impact on Western thinking.

Not being particularly much of a Francophile (and reading Albert Camus's The Rebel gave me a lot of good reasons to think of the French Revolution as pretty much a failure of ideas), I disagree with the last sentence. For Hoosiers, we enshrined the essence of the Declaration of Independence in our state Bill of Rights.

Watch House Committee on Joint Rules Hearing on SJR 7-Definition of Marriage

Another online video - on gay marriage. Just like the following post, just found and not watched. I am passing it along with commentary to follow - when work allows.

Taking Down Words on Gay Marriage Ban

Go now to TDW and read her post on marriage and the gay marriage ban. Having been married for about a year and half after a long time of bachelorhood, I got to say what she wrote about marriage was magnificently inspiring. My wife has put up with some boneheaded stupidity out of me and I have learned to live with her. Neither was easy.

She also makes good points about the constitutional ban on gay marriage - unneeded, enshrines discrimination in our state constitution, hypocritical if the idea is to help married couples. The pinheads come out in force in the comments. Who is frightened by gay marriage? Not liberals and Democrats. If we are frightened by anything, it is the injustice that would become part of our state constitution.

Marriage is both religious sacrament and civil institution. Are marriages performed by a judge, the same as those performed by a priest? I think Catholic law still would not recognize the former as a marriage. Can I get married in a church, but not have the State of Indiana recognize it? I would need to research the issue but I think it is possible.

Does canon law establish how property is inherited? No, that is for the civil law. Now, I do think that Islam is a bit different there.

Try thinking about it this way, a church could recognize gay marriage. Nothing that church does alters the fact that Indiana law does not recognize these marriages and those gays married in that church lack the property rights of us heterosexuals.

The reverse is equally true. If Indiana law were to recognize gay marriage, the State of Indiana cannot require a church to perform gay marriages.