World according to Lump

Gay marriage is something that I’ve actually flip-flopped on since I first heard of the debate.  I used to believe in civil unions for gays but not marriage until my kid sister was kind enough to point out the ridiculousness of playing semantics and how even though I thought it was a minor detail, it was in fact demeaning to try to marginalize gay marriage through language tricks.  I could bore you with arguments like how straight people aren’t exactly doing much to protect the sanctity of the institution, or how invoking the Bible in the argument, certainly blows the whole separation of church & state right out of the water.

I’m going a different direction.

I think this point is lost on a lot of people, this amendment has nothing to do with the legalization of gay marriage.  If the no votes outnumber the yes votes, this does not mean that gays will be lined up at city halls across the state on Wednesday morning.  At its core, this amendment wants to clarify that a right that is already denied to a small group of people will continued to be denied.  I’m already not allowed to drive 90 mph in my truck, but it certainly would be much more clear if there was constitutional amendment that stated that driving 90 mph in a black 1998 Ford Explorer with a broken rear wiper was illegal.  Let’s get the geniuses in St. Paul working on that.

This amendment is on the ballot right now for a couple of reasons.  The first is that it is very clear that momentum is definitely on the side of the enlightened folks who aren’t threatened by allowing loving people to marry regardless of what their packing in their shorts.  This is an effort to put up an extra roadblock to any future legislation that will truly allow for equal rights.  This also is an attempt by some members of the right to try to strengthen their party’s standing across all elections tomorrow by triggering a hot button topic that will spur every available conservative to make sure to vote.  Afterall, the last GOP candidate that won Minnesota was Tricky Dick Nixon.  Seriously, in my lifetime my state has voted Democrat every year, the only state that can claim that thanks to Fritz.

I know many people may vote for the marriage amendment based on their religious teachings.  I’m certainly won’t try to malign anyone’s beliefs, it just differs from mine.  The UCC preached love for everyone, I love it, but it’s probably not for everyone.  Some folks need a little more fire, brimstone & judgement.

Bottom line, if your conscience tells you the vote yes, do that, if you choose to vote no, do that, but if you’re just not convinced of either side, just leave this part of the ballot blank.  It’s an old wive’s tale that leaving parts of your ballot blanks invalidates the whole thing.  If you do enough research to know the difference between your Soil & Conservation Officer candidates than by all means, go for 100% completion, but know you don’t have to.  My epiphany moment was when I voted for Alan Page based on his career as a Purple People Eater rather than his career as a barrister.

There’s so much misinformation surrounding the voter ID amendment.  The three that drive me the most nuts are the arguments about the need for this, the cost of this and the effect of this.  They’re all bad arguments.

Liberals will tell you that because there have been very few cases of documented voter fraud, that this means there is next to no incidents of voter fraud occurring.  This argument is wrought with problems, the main one being that the secret ballot system doesn’t allow for a system to track who cast fraudulent votes.  The secret ballot is a great concept and one that I don’t want to change, but right now with the power of Photoshop, I could doctor a single utility bill to read a large number of bogus names and addresses and the only thing that would limit the extent of my fraud would be how many different precincts I could get to before the polls close.  Weeks later, folks at the Secretary of State’s office may be able to tell that the ballots of Mike Hunt, Ben Dover, I.P. Daly, Buster Cherry & Heywood J’Blumme were in fact not legitimate ballots, but there is no way that they can remove these votes from the election.  Now these cases usually won’t have any impact on an election, but we do have close elections.  The Senate election in Minnesota that elected Al Franken over Norm Coleman came down to a winning margin of 312 votes out of 2,885,555 votes cast.

There’s a group that running commercials opposing amendment that are now running ads featuring Governor Mark Dayton & Governor Arne Carlson.  In the ads Arne Carlson keeps repeating that the amendment will cost the state over $100 million dollars.  I’ve tried figuring out how he could come up with that figure since he does not support the figure with any proof, but I think I’ve done it for him.  The amendment may indeed cost us over $100 million dollars through the year 7839.  But you have to remember that in the year 7839, a large soda will also cost you $100 million, but of course that’s purely hypothetical because the bleeding heart folks will certainly protects us from ourselves by that time and outlaw pop.

The effect of the amendment is the area that I find most illuminating.  There are some people that will tell you that voter ID laws are racist.  Here’s the honest truth, voter ID laws are as racist as speed limits.  Do not let people try to bully you by telling you they are.  In fact I would suggest that anyone who believes that voter ID laws are racist, on some level expects less of minorities if they think the simple process of obtaining a photo ID is somehow more difficult for any certain group, and that sounds pretty racist to me.

Vote with your heart and you can’t go wrong, but if you feel the integrity of our elections is important, than consider voting yes on the voter ID amendment.