This just tickles me pink, I have to say. A friend posted the text of a news article in which the executive director of Allies for Marriage and Children demonstrates her failure to grasp the basic principles of irony.

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My initial reaction to this was "Right on!" My second reaction is mixed, after reading a counter-argument elsewhere on my friends list. jenny_junipurr feels very strongly that this is a wrong way to go about pointing up the inequity of the court ruling; that it will harm innocent people who sincerely wish to have children but are unable to.

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That, however, is exactly the point this organization is trying to make: That DOMA laws harm innocent people. The entire reason for promoting the new initiative is to provoke the "but that's not FAIR!" reaction - and then use it to demonstrate that what's unfair for one is equally unfair for all.

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I do understand that, and that's why my first reaction was strongly positive.

I also think jenny_junipurr has a valid point -- is it appropriate to cause harm in the pursuit of reducing harm?

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The expectation, and I think it a reasonable one, is that no harm will be done because there's no way in hell such a law would pass Constitutional muster, even under this court.

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And THEN we would have precedent to go after the similar "protection" laws.

Brilliant.

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Only if you will actually cause harm. What this will do, hopefully, is point out that the law is supposed to be the servant of the people, not vice versa. What it will *not* do is make people prove they are fertile before they can be married, or annul a marriage... the initiatives will not, and *can not* pass, and if they did, they'd be challenged in court, and not put in force, and if that didn't happen, if people *passed* the initiatives, and the courts *upheld* the initiatives, the world is so incredibly crazy that it's not the initiatives that caused the problem.

Sigh. And I just checked out her post, and well... I'm not impressed.

I sympathize. I really do. I wish there was a better way.

But it's easy for a married woman to say "How dare you hurt people's feelings, just to get the same rights as me!"

And the real people who are doing the feelings-hurting are those who made the issue of marriage out to being about having children in the first place. If gay folks didn't have to counter "but marriage is all about the babies!" in the first place, they wouldn't even have contemplated such an initiative.

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Agreed. Blame for any pain this initiative causes should be laid on those who made it necessary.

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