Nothing of Substance in Today's News

Of course, the Shrub stammered his way through a defense of the first attempt to enshrine discrimination in our Constitution since the Civil War, the Defense of Marriage Amendment. Colorado should be ashamed, our very own Wayne the Torture and Homophobe Allard sponsored the ill-named act - it will do nothing to reduce divorce or abuse among heterosexual couples, it will do nothing to protect children from the violence of a testosterone-crazed, abusive father or to keep families from becoming dysfunctional. Instead, it will prevent a very small percentage of the population from the hope of ever becoming a family.

Of course it won't pass. It was never intended to pass, rather to rally the Christian Taliban behind a failing leader and a failed Republican Congress. The ploy is so transparent they couldn't even show Dobson or Falwell or Robertson at the White House today, instead a Shrub special select audience of supporters who have little relationship to Americans at large. And it will work. The Christian Taliban are so bent on following that one verse in Leviticus that they forget that eating pork or lobster are also abominations and that working on the Sabbath (Saturday for the Biblically illiterate) should be punished by death. Jesus himself forbade divorce in all but the most restrictive of cases yet I don't see the Christian Taliban writing a prohibition on divorce into the amendment. In short, the amendment and the thought process of those behind it has nothing to do with the Bible or any Christian belief nor has it anything to do with sexual preference. It has everything to do with one number, 29%.

The Shrubpublicans might just get a few percentage points back from the Pious but they will lose the middle over this. Democrats should make every point of telling everyone every chance they get how the Shrubpublicans waste their time on futile pitches to the Dobson crowd while the business of the other seventy-five percent of us is left undone. But then, it's easier to have a position - against gay marriage - than a conviction called statesmanship.