Democrats who a few months back were praising Chief Justice Roberts for his judicial restraint in respecting the intent of Congress are sniveling like stuck cats that the Supreme Court of Minnesota (SCOM) didn’t find a penumbra emanating from Alida Messinger’s visage forcing them to accept their masters’ complaints without question.
The lawsuits by the ACLU, the League of Women Voters and Alida’s Cause Common Cause claimed on the one hand that the Voter ID law was just too complicated and not clear enough for public-educated Minnesotans to understand, and on the other than Mark Ritchie had the right to make both measures more complicated and less clear.
I may be a cynic, but I’m frankly amazed the judges disagreed.
And now, the pro-gay-marriage and pro-vote-corruption forces need to do something neither has been able to do:
- The anti-Marriage-Amendment forces need to show the voters a case for changing the definition of traditional marriage a little more convincing than “vote no or you are teh bigot”.
- The pro-fraud forces need to convince Minnesotans that while buying cigarettes or getting a job or buying ammunition or starting a bank account requires that we know someone is exactly who they say they are, exercising our supposedly-precious franchise does not.
It’s a good day.
I’ll await the usual logic-free liberal arguments on both.
UPDATE: Mir. D has an excellent piece on the subject at True North and over at the Neighborhood:
I’ll be honest with you — the Photo ID amendment matters a lot more to me. We’ve been round and round on gay marriage and as I’ve written before, this is a battle that ultimately conservatives are going to lose, mostly because young people are being taught that it is a civil rights issue, especially in the public schools. While I don’t agree with that, the view will prevail and most of the constitutional amendments that are passing in the various states will eventually go away, probably within 10-20 years. At that point we’ll begin the unwitting longitudinal study that will eventually reveal, years after most readers of this feature are pushing up daisies, whether or not gay marriage is a good idea or not. My future grandchildren and great-grandchildren (God willing) will get to suss that one out.
The Photo ID amendment is much more important, because it goes the integrity of elections. Voter suppression is the usual charge you hear, but as a practical matter the real issue is multiple votes and illegal votes. The challenge is getting local election officials and prosecutors, who are partisans, to take such things seriously. Minnesota Majority identified 1,099 cases of felons voting in the Franken/Coleman election and over 200 cases have been either adjudicated or are in the process of being investigated. The rest aren’t going to see the light of day because the local prosecutors can’t be bothered. Franken won the election by on 312 votes…Now the amendments go for a vote. I expect Photo ID to win easily. The marriage amendment will be close. Opponents of both amendments will have ample opportunity to state their case. They just can’t depend on Mark Ritchie to keep his thumb on the scale this time.
And there’s the victory for real justice.
And I never believed the SCOM or Minnesota law had it in ’em.
Will the integrity of the vote matter when a majority of the people cannot tell truth from lies?
Thanks, Mitch!
I would be happy if we could just get the anti-marriage people to stop saying that this amendment “Bans gay marriage” when it does nothing of the sort. Regardless of this amendment, pass or fail, NOTHING CHANGES with regard to the marriage laws. Unless, of course, somebody goes to court and gets them overturned, which is actually the agenda here, and don’t let anybody tell you differently.
It’s similar to the Voter ID question, in that the only reason to oppose it is because you WANT to be able to continue to cheat in elections– no other reason– but they can’t say /that/.
“NOTHING CHANGES with regard to the marriage laws.”
This would take us back to the 1990’s, aka the “days of homophobic terror”, when the president of United States — A Democrat! — signed DOMA and openly stated his opposition to same-sex marriage.
The 1990’s. Makes your skin crawl just to think of it.
The misnomer I find most disturbing is that I/we are “anti-gay.” What two consenting adults do behind closed doors means nothing to any conservative. What we object to is the ENDORSEMENT of this behavior by the state.
The very first act of the gay rights crowd upon the passage of gay marriage, will be to knock on the public school doors and say “we’re legal now. Now that the state has endorsed us, we want public schools to allow us to promote our lifestyle.”
At that point, the state loses its role as being neutral in matters of faith and/or conscience.
Big;
Unfortunately, I think that there are far too many schools that already promotes the glbt lifestyle, if only by proxy.
Boss: In a de facto sense, you’re right, but at least now parents have the ability to go to a school and cry ‘foul.’ After gay marriage is legalized, there will be no dissention tolerated by evil, bigoted parents who might object to the gay lifestyle being promoted as “normal.”
TBS wrote: The misnomer I find most disturbing is that I/we are “anti-gay.”
They (meaning the Forces of Evil) have been polluting the language for some time now. I know gay people (two actually) who are against gay marriage. Are they “anti-gay” or “homophobic”? If they aren’t, why would it be fair to assume that a heterosexual person who is against same-sex marriage is “anti-gay” or “homophobic”?
Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English Language” is worth revisiting now & then.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
So what you have here is an elected official illegally changing the wording of a ballot in order to influence the outcome of an election.
This is what the Brennan Center for Justice calls “electoral fraud” (as opposed to voter fraud). I’m sure the Brennan Center will work very hard to see that Ritchie is put in jail, or at least sanctioned, over this flagrant abuse of his office.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
I like that, thanks for sharing Terry!
“…work very hard to see that Ritchie is put in jail,..”
One can dream.
If you want to see artful use of language at its finest, check out the Brennan Center for Justice definition of voter fraud:
More precisely, “voter fraud” occurs when individuals cast ballots despite knowing that they are ineligible to vote, in an attempt to defraud the election system.
http://truthaboutfraud.org/pdf/TruthAboutVoterFraud.pdf
This is the definition that most anti-voter-ID people use (DG, for example).
Most people would define voter fraud as casting a vote illegally. Intent would have nothing to with it, or rather, an individual would have to be responsible for taking reasonable care that there vote was validly cast. This point is missing from the Brennan Center’s definition, so if you are stupid enough to think you can legally vote absentee for your sick granny AND for yourself, or that you can vote where you live AND where you work, it’s not voter fraud.
It’s also not “voter fraud” unless you are attempting to defraud the election system, a very difficult thing to prove.
An example I’ve used before: a partisan operator (let’s call it ACERN) sends a van around to pick up derelicts, take them to three or four polling places and have them vote in each one.
No voter fraud has been committed, according to the Brennan Center. The derelicts claim they thought what they were ding was legal. The only people attempting to defraud the electoral system are the ACERN people, and they haven’t cast a ballot knowing that they were ineligible to do so.