Talk Radio, MA Legislature Kills Gay Marriage Vote

BOOM

Just Like That, A Goldmine For Talk Radio, GOP







Thanks again to the kind of extremism only the Bay State seems able to produce, talk radio and the Republican Party have been handed a great nationwide issue to fuel listenership and partisan donations this summer.

And with core supporters angry over the party's pro- amnesty position for illegal aliens, a reignition of the gay marriage issue couldn't have come at a better time. Thanks, Massachusetts!

Yes, if the Bay State didn't exist, the GOP would have to invent it, as time and again it has proven a useful tool for nationwide fundraising.

Today, within hours of a key decision by the state's legislature to overturn the will of almost 200,000 citizens who signed petitions asking for a vote on gay marriage, talk radio was buzzing across the country.

The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby was doing interviews almost immediately, according to this brief but brilliant new column (we will beg his forgiveness in advance and run the whole thing):

THOSE OF US who have lived with the Bay State's marriage war for years can lose sight of how extreme we appear to much of the rest of the country.

This afternoon, the Legislature shot down the proposed constitutional amendment that would have banned same-sex marriage. A few minutes after the vote, I was on the air discussing it with Dennis Prager, a nationally syndicated radio host based in Los Angeles. Citizen initiatives and referendums are nothing new to Californians, who vote on ballot issues all the time, but Prager wanted me to shed some light on the convoluted process a citizen-proposed constitutional amendment in Massachusetts must go through before it reaches the voters.

So I explained that even though 170,000 Bay State voters had signed petitions to put a marriage amendment on the ballot, it first had to undergo a vote in two consecutive sessions of the Legislature, and win support from at least 25 percent of the lawmakers each time. Since it had failed to do that, the amendment was now dead.

Prager wasn't sure he'd heard me right. Are you telling me, he asked in disbelief, that fewer than one in four Massachusetts legislators thinks marriage should be defined as the union of a man and a woman? Yes, I told him; the vote to kill the amendment was 151 to 45. ''Incredible,'' said Prager.

Barring a new petition drive by supporters of traditional marriage, the battle over same-sex wedlock may be finished in Massachusetts. But today's vote on Beacon Hill is a political grenade waiting to detonate elsewhere. It is only a matter of time before a same-sex couple married in Massachusetts finds a federal judge prepared to rule that under the US Constitution, their marriage license must be granted ''full faith and credit'' by every other state. Same-sex marriage will be the law of the land.

Only a federal marriage amendment can keep that from happening. Today's vote may have settled the issue in Massachusetts. It has unsettled it everywhere else.

Jacoby is right on target: what had become a moribund political issue has now been thrust back into the spotlight, just in time for hard- fought national election battles coming just around the corner.

And with his history of battling these very extremists, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney can only benefit from today's Hugo Chavez- style legislative move.


THERE'S MORE on this topic at SaveWRKO.

SAVE Internet radio: it's almost too late!


Please help support the Radio Equalizer:

Your Amazon orders that begin with clicks here, regardless of what you ultimately purchase, help to further this site's efforts.

Or, if you would prefer, please contribute at the Honor System box in the upper right corner. Thanks again!


Technorati tags: talk radio jeff jacoby gay marriage mass mass legislature boston boston globe dennis prager gay marriage vote

Photo: Mike Adaskaveg, Boston Herald