What in the hell is going on? Yes, I am happy that Obama is the
president elect, but in the same states that supported that, in which
record turnout of African Americans came out to vote, look what else happened...
A constitutional amendment effectively banning same-sex marriage appeared to pass in California with most of the vote counted Wednesday,
while voters in Arizona and Florida Tuesday approved similar measures.
In California, Proposition 8, which was placed on the ballot by citizen initiative, amends the state constitution to provide that
"[o]nly marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in
California." ...
What the Hell is wrong with people? Now there is actually a
discriminatory law on the Constitution of three more states. In
California, 18,000 couples just got told their marriage is worthless. There is efforts to find the Amendment as unconstitional,
as it obviously is, but that is going to take time. And look how they
did it, through direct democracy (which I discussed several times as a
way to do GOOD things, not this horseshit) and the funding of racist
and psychotic religious nutballs. Don't believe me? Check this out...
Among the local ballot measures to be decided on Election Day,
California’s Proposition 8 is perhaps the most fiercely contested.
Backers of the proposition to ban same-sex marriage in the state cast
their campaign in apocalyptic terms. “This vote on whether we stop the
gay-marriage juggernaut in California is Armageddon,” born-again
Watergate felon and Prison Fellowship Ministries founder Chuck Colson
told the New York Times. Tony Perkins, the president of the Christian
right’s most powerful Beltway lobbying outfit, Family Research Council,
echoed Colson’s language. “It’s more important than the presidential
election,” Perkins said of Prop 8. “We will not survive [as a nation]
if we lose the institution of marriage.”
The campaign for Prop 8 has reaped massive funding from conservative
backers across the country. Much of it comes from prominent donors like
the Utah-based Church of Latter Day Saints and the Catholic
conservative group, Knights of Columbus. Prop 8 has also received a
boost from Elsa Broekhuizen, the widow of Michigan-based Christian
backer Edgard Prince and the mother of Erik Prince, founder of the
controversial mercenary firm, Blackwater.
While the Church of
Latter Day Saints’ public role in Prop 8 has engendered a growing
backlash from its more liberal members, and Broekhuizen’s involvement
attracted some media attention, the extreme politics of Prop 8’s third
largest private donor, Howard F. Ahmanson, reclusive heir to a banking
fortune, have passed almost completely below the media’s radar.
Ahmanson has donated $900,000 to the passage of Prop 8 so far.
...
Few Americans have heard of Ahmanson—and that's the way he likes it. He
donates cash either out of his own pocket or through his unincorporated
Fieldstead & Co. to avoid having to report the names of his
grantees to the IRS. His Tourette's syndrome only adds to his
mysterious persona, as his fear of speaking leads him to shun the
media. While Ahmanson once resided in a mental institution in Kansas,
he now occupies a position among the Christian right’s power pantheon
as one of the movement’s most influential donors. During a 1985
interview with the Orange County Register, Ahmanson summarized his
political agenda: “My goal is the total integration of biblical law
into our lives.”
The
campaign to teach “intelligent design” in public school classrooms, the
Republican takeover of the California Assembly, and the rollback of
affirmative action in California—Ahmanson has been behind them all. He
has also taken a special interest in anti-gay crusades. Ahmanson’s most
controversial episode related to his funding of the religious empire of
Rousas John Rushdoony, a radical evangelical theologian who advocated
placing the United States under the control of a Christian theocracy
that would mandate the stoning to death of homosexuals. With Prop 8
organizers claiming in a virtual mantra that their measure will not
harm gays or take rights away from heterosexual Californians, Ahmanson
has good reason to conceal his involvement in the campaign.
When
Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. was born in 1950, his father, then 44 years old,
was feting visiting kings and queens and basking in the opulence of his
mansion on Harbor Island, an exclusive address in Southern California's
Newport Harbor. Howard Junior was tended by an army of servants and
ferried to and from school in a limousine. Watching the world glide by
through darkened windows, he was gripped with a longing to cast off his
wealth and disappear into anonymity. He burned with resentment toward
his father, a remote, towering presence, referred to by friends and
foes alike as “Emperor Ahmanson.” While Ahmanson Sr. showered local
institutions in the Los Angeles area with charitable gifts from the
fortune he amassed as the founder of Washington Mutual, his son was
starved for attention.
The Emperor’s succession plans began to
erode when Ahmanson turned ten and his beloved mother served his father
with divorce papers. She died a few years later. When Howard was 18,
his father died, too, sinking him into depths of despair. With his $300
million inheritance, he was now California’s—and perhaps
America’s—richest teenager. But he was without direction, afraid and
utterly alone. The tics, twitches and uncontrollable verbal spasms
caused by his Tourette’s syndrome worsened. He could not cope with his
emotions and during increasingly stressful episodes he would
uncontrollably blurt out shocking statements. Unable to look people in
the eye when he spoke to them, he became socially paralyzed. Diagnosed
as schizophrenic, he spent two years at the Menninger Clinic, a Topeka,
Kansas psychiatric institution. "I resented my family background," he
told the Register in 1985. "[My father] could never be a role model,
whether by habits or his lifestyle, it was never anything I wanted."
After graduating from Occidental College with poor marks, Ahmanson
became drawn to a heavily politicized brand of Christianity that was
growing popular in evangelical circles. He discovered the writings of a
radical right-wing theologian whose family was massacred in the
Armenian genocide, R.J. Rushdoony, Rushdoony’s book, The Politics of
Guilt and Pity, in which the theologian mocked wealthy liberals, struck
a particular chord with the young Ahmanson. “The guilty rich will
indulge in philanthropy, and the guilty white men will show 'love' and
'concern' for Negroes and other such persons who are in actuality
repulsive and intolerable to them,” Rushdoony wrote. Ahmanson read
avidly as though Rushdoony were describing his own life.
While
Ahmanson gave no indication he shared Rushdoony’s crude racism, through
the theologian’s scathing critique of “the guilty rich” he began to
release himself from the burden of responsibility to carry on his
father’s legacy. He promptly sold his stock in his father's company and
invested it in lucrative real estate acquisitions, with a goal of
earning returns of 20 to 25 percent per year. That assured that his
wealth would grow quickly, but it also made him vulnerable to people
who manipulated his residual guilt complex to get a cut of his fortune.
Rushdoony’s
political ideas provided Ahmanson with a framework for his
philanthropic machinations. Describing his philosophy as “Christian
Reconstructionism,” Rushdoony painstakingly outlined plans for the
church to take over the federal government and “reconstruct” it along
biblical lines. He provided detailed plans for how it would provide
healthcare, pave roads and reorganize schools, and how it would mete
out justice.
Calling for the literal application of all 613 laws
described in the Book of Leviticus, Rushdoony paid special attention to
punishments. Instead of serving prison sentences, criminals would be
sentenced to indentured servitude, whipped, sold into slavery, or
executed. “God's government prevails,” Rushdoony wrote, “and His
alternatives are clear-cut: either men and nations obey His laws, or
God invokes the death penalty against them.” Those eligible on
Rushdoony’s long list for execution included disobedient children,
unchaste women, apostates, blasphemers, practitioners of witchcraft,
astrologers, adulterers, and, of course, anyone who engaged in “sodomy
or homosexuality.”...
Does no one else see that this is the same Bullshit that we
dealt with years ago when blacks and whites couldn't marry? Same thing.
These people are insane (some of them as you seen, quite literally),
and they are pushing the cart of the religious right, and no one sees
it. And now the Associated press reports African Americans,
who were once the target of the same hate-filled legislations, actually
supported this discrimination, while the gays they apparently hate so
much, came out in mass to support Barack Obama. Confusing, and
upsetting to say the least, that anyone, much less people who endured
it, would support these wack-jobs in doing the same thing to someone
else...