Thank you. I think it would have been entirely possible for the recent attempt at an anti-gay constitutional amendment to succeed. Minnesotans are, by and large, a little inclined to tradition, to a sort of comfortably midwestern view of family, to be cautious about change.
What it took to defeat this amendment was to put those values up against something stronger: Minnesota Nice.
Had you not been quite so blatantly malicious, I think the amendment would likely have passed. If your press releases had not dripped with insincerity and venom, I don’t think quite as many ordinary Minnesotans who had never really thought about the issue would have come to the conclusion that they cared more about being basically decent than they cared about their own comfort zones.
Just look at this lovely headline: Stolen sign- Actions like this show it won’t be live and let live if marriage is not protected in Minnesota.
The notion that vandalized signs are proof of some general trait of all the people who feel a given way is ridiculous. I am well aware that people who have “Darwin” fish on their cars and park near some kinds of churches tend to get them vandalized, but I don’t for a minute imagine that Christians in general are vandals. Every group has jerks. We know that, and in general we tend not to try to generalize about groups from a few jerks; indeed, we try very hard not to generalize about groups like that.
But what you guys did is establish that, in your case, it wasn’t “a few” jerks; it was the entire operation. You taught us all that not only did you have people who were malicious and dishonest, but that it was so uniform throughout your organization that nothing you published would ever have a shred of charity or kindness in it. You showed, very clearly, that this amendment was completely rooted in dishonesty and malice. You wrote things that made people look away, embarassed. Things that made people feel ashamed to be in any way associated with you. You reminded people that what is truly disgusting is not other people’s sex lives, but treating other people with contempt.
Thank you. Because of your tireless efforts to remind us that this was fundamentally about the desire to marginalize and exclude people, you made Minnesota the first state to reject an anti-gay constitutional amendment at the polls. By keeping your dishonesty shallow enough that your real motives were obvious, you reminded Minneostans that kindness is one of our cultural values, won the day for the American dream of equality and liberty for all.
Please don’t disband. Please continue spewing your disgusting filth and vitriol, slandering good people, and engaging in rhetorical dishonesty that would be a good example for a fourth-grade level class in critical thinking. When it comes time to legalize gay marriage in Minnesota, we will be relying on you to make the anti-gay position so repugnant that people aren’t willing to vote for it either.