Marriage is a union of husband and wife because these kinds of unions are distinctive and necessary to the whole society.
If Californians vote no on Proposition 8, the great historical cross-cultural meaning of marriage will be replaced by the new government dogma on which gay marriage is based: There is no difference between same-sex unions and opposite-sex unions; anyone who thinks otherwise is just a bigot.
Our children will imbibe this new dogma in hundreds of ways, and the old marriage idea -- marriage matters because children need a mother and a father, long for a mother and a father, deserve a mother and a father -- will be publicly discredited as discriminatory.
A victory for Proposition 8 will not deprive same-sex couples of a single practical right or benefit under California state laws. Civil unions will continue to provide legal protections for same-sex families. But the people of California will reclaim from four state Supreme Court justices the right to define marriage as a union of husband and wife, for generations to come.
I don't normally cite Bob Herbert of the New York Times, but he makes a good point today on the unknown shape of potential racial voting Tuesday, i.e., the possibility of a Bradley Effect:
The most significant factor vying with the economy in this election is also the greatest unknown: the race issue. The election would likely be a runaway if not for Senator Obama’s race. He’s leading, but the question is whether the poll numbers accurately reflect what is going on with the electorate.
That's fair enough, and Herbert notes that polling experts discount the likelihood of anti-Obama racial voting (and recall that some have suggested that race may actually help Obama among guilty whites).
It is no accident that the largest single polling disparity between McCain and Obama voters, apart from race itself, is age. Obama's candidacy is in large part a rebellion of the young, for whom race has much less saliency, and one of the great indeterminacies of the election is how many young people will turn out to vote. Another is whether the increase in those who will vote for Obama in part because of his race—most notably, African-Americans, who are registering in large numbers—will offset or exceed those who will vote against him in part for the same reason. This immensely complex question, which goes far beyond the debate over the so-called "Bradley Effect" (the disparity between what voters tell pollsters and what they actually do in the voting booth), turns at its heart on whether race can be used effectively as a kind of "ignition switch" to make of Obama, for a critical subset of voters in a handful of critical states, a figure too culturally "different" and "foreign" and "elite" to seem in the end a plausible leader.
The potential is certainly there, for one sees persistent signs of it in everyday life. "I could never vote for Obama"—I've heard variations of this line a great many times over the last few weeks, most recently from a waiter who noticed me paging through the newspaper's political coverage. "I could never vote for a Muslim," he went on, smiling apologetically; and what struck me about the ensuing exchange was my inability to convince this man, whom I've known for years, that Obama is Christian—"He only converted when he was twelve," he insisted—or that he hadn't "changed his position, on everything, almost every day." Whether or not such disinformation is planted or actively encouraged, and however much its persistence might owe to race, it is clear that it flows like a subterranean stream through much of the country and the extent and depth of that stream are impossible to quantify.
What is not in doubt is that this substratum of concern or discomfort about race, and complementary worries about Obama as a foreigner or outsider for whom a vote would thus become a perilous gamble, have provided a prime target for Republican political and media operatives. Their delicate task in the weeks ahead will be to blend race with more traditional Republican "hot-button" "culture war" themes—worries about patriotism, elitism, sex education, abortion, gay marriage—and construct out of this mix a series of potent images and symbols intended to peel off from the Democratic coalition so-called "Reagan Democrats," conservative, often "ethnic" urban and suburban working- and middle-class voters.
Voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Colorado and a handful of other states will likely hear much about Reverend Wright and his call to "God Damn America!" and about Senator Obama's supposed support for "teaching kindergartners about sex before we teach them to read." These thirty-second pieces of political art, whether produced by the McCain campaign itself, the Republican National Committee, or "independent" groups, will be aimed at a subset of the 12 percent or so of voters who remain undecided, and are intended to lower the numbers of those who say they look positively on Obama and "identify" with his "values and background"—numbers that, as I write, have been declining even as the candidate's national numbers are rising.
That such ads will be denounced as distortions and lies will not necessarily blunt their effectiveness, for they are directed at a narrow audience that tends to distrust or ignore the "mainstream media." They work, when they do work, according to a logic of powerful symbols and images which tend to overwhelm facts, particularly when those facts come from a world of reporters and commentators viewed as inherently biased and "elite." And they are directed at an audience—the so-called "beer-drinking" or "lunch-pail" Democrats—which, having largely favored Hillary Clinton in the primaries, especially in the critical old industrial states of the Midwest that Obama lost, may be more than usually receptive to their appeal.
Whether or not John McCain's campaign will be able to exploit this vulnerability turns on whether, among these several million critical voters, fear of an unfamiliar African-American "elitist" can be made to overwhelm fear of an extension of Republican governance that few can now doubt has proved catastrophic for the country. Obama has hammered away on the latter theme, declaring at every opportunity that "the country cannot afford four more years of the same Bush policies"—and then the financial crisis, striking like a bolt of lightning, illuminated for all to see the ruins of the economic landscape. McCain, who has been struggling to present himself as a populist (and, implicitly, anti-Bush) "maverick" who would lead the country on a very different course, understood the danger the crisis posed for him but fumbled badly in his attempt to exploit it. Even as Republicans unleash a new onslaught designed to increase his opponent's "negatives," McCain must somehow make his "maverick" argument credible, not least by joining it to a positive economic vision for the country; only thus is he likely to persuade enough voters who are disgusted with Republican policies and deeply worried about the economy—but who still fear, or can be made to fear, a President Obama.
Barack Obama's Zeituni Onyango double-illegal alien and campaign donor scandal won't be enough to slow down the Democratic nominee's snowball effect.
It's great, though, that the story's getting mainstream play, in any case: Don't you know, with Barack Hussein Obama - our man! - it's a bottomless pit of lies, improprieties, skeletons (aunts)?
And keep in mind, while the lefties are alleging that the Bush administration broke the law to help John McCain, there's not a peep among the radicals about how old Zeituni successfully resisted a deportation order from the federal government, staying in the U.S. illegally on the public's dime in a subsidized apartment-unit recently refurbished with a HUD-HOPE block grant to Zeituni's Boston public-housing complex.
Folks what you're looking at is the future shape of politics-as-usual under a Barack Obama administration.
But wait! Here we see Obama thowing his aunt under the bus, and - don't you know it?!! - he's being slammed for it by the nihilists!
