My Tuesday column is ready to roll, beginning with this:
While most of America appears to be getting in line with history by embracing marriage equality, there continues to be a strikingly large pile of holdouts who obviously don’t recall the infamy of those who opposed interracial marriage, women’s suffrage, integration, the Civil Rights Act and the freeing of the slaves. On second thought, most of us remember the sociopaths who desperately wanted to preserve slavery. They were called Confederates and around 300,000 of them were killed in the name of their sinister, futile and ultimately extinct cause.
And so we ought to remember with similar disdain the names of the people who continue to believe that gay Americans are second-class citizens not worthy of equal protection and civil rights. The list includes nearly the Republican Party minus two members of Congress (Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Richard L. Hanna) along with a gradually shrinking list of Democrats.
In the House, Democratic opponents of same-sex marriage include Reps. John Barrow, Sanford Bishop, Henry Cuellar, Gene Green, Dan Lipinski, Jim Matheson, Mike McIntyre, Collin Peterson, Nick Rahall, Bill Enyart and Pete Gallego. In the Senate, it’s Sens. Joe Manchin, Kay Hagan, Bill Nelson, Heidi Heitkamp, Mary Landrieu, Tim Johnson, Joe Donnelly and Mark Pryor. These are all Democrats who are, shockingly, to the right of Bill O’Reilly on marriage equality, and it’s time to get with the program or be relegated into the where-are-they-now file.
And as the walls begin to crumble around the last of the holdouts, their most ridiculous counterarguments have become even more ridiculous. [continue reading here]