Multi-Joint Movement
Thanks to the Supremes’ pro-homo decisions earlier this week, Georgians who want to get gay married now just have to ask the Georgia Legislature to allow a referendum vote to reverse the state’s constitutional ban on gay marriage.
That’ll happen right around the time Paula Deen gets a clue. Which is, never.
Why? Because in the Georgia legislature, Republicans outnumber Democrats 2:1. That kind of numerical domination seems a little fishy, given there are roughly the same number of Democrat and Republican voters in this state. So how’d the white ultra-conservatives amass this kind of outsized political power? A hundred-plus years of poll taxes, gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, and other forms of voter suppression – the kinds of shenanigans that the Voting Rights Act was passed to defend against.
The same Voting Rights Act the Supremes gutted the day before they went all pro-homo? Indeed.
We here in Georgia shouldn’t be surprised. It was, after all, Georgia’s Republican Representatives who in 2006 led the ideological attack on the Voting Rights Act that ultimately resulted in its judicial gutting earlier this week.
We should be gathering our forces to pass an updated Voting Rights Act capable of ending the deceptive crap (what Justice Ginsberg kindly called “subtler second-generation barriers”) those in power use to create things like 2:1 dominance in the legislature. Instead, we’re celebrating a pair of Supreme Court rulings that, taken together, allow couples who are gay-married in progressive states like California, Massachusetts and New York to now file their federal taxes jointly. And, for those who are extraordinarily wealthy, to get as spectacular a tax break as extraordinarily wealthy straight people do when it comes to paying estate taxes.
I’m not mad at cheering. I think celebration is good, and that we should all engage in more celebratory dancing. It’s just that sometimes it seems our side is cheering ourselves for doing a nice set of bicep curls with lavender 8-pound weights while the conservative wing-nuts are out on the floor squatting 700 pounds for reps. We throw streamers and glitter after winning victories for the very few while they’re using the power they already have to Read more…