Here's a stepladder...now get over yourself!
Carcieri calls for referendum vote on same-sex marriage
09:30 AM EDT on Thursday, April 9, 2009
By Katherine Gregg
Journal State House Bureau
Governor Carcieri and his wife, Sue, speak at a news conference Wednesday on the National Organization for Marriage campaign. Behind them is Ken Fish, who supports giving gay people the right to marry.
PROVIDENCE - On the day after Vermont legalized same-sex marriage, Rhode Island Governor Carcieri, with his wife Sue at his side, took center stage at a State House news conference on Wednesday to say: “I think we should to be doing everything we can to protect traditional marriage.”
As the featured speaker at the launch of a new TV ad campaign being mounted here and in other battleground states by opponents of same-sex marriage, Carcieri said he is not anti-gay, but does not believe this is a “civil rights issue,” as argued by those urging lawmakers here to allow same-sex marriage.
Click to view“I have lots of friends, family, business associates, associates within state government who are gay or lesbian, whatever. That’s not the issue. This is not an issue for me of gay rights,” Carcieri said. “This is an issue pretty simply of definition of marriage, and reasonable people can disagree about that, but I feel very strongly about that both personally and, I think, in my role [as governor] I want to do everything I can to make sure as a state we are protecting that.”
Asked later who within his own family he was talking about, his office had no comment.
But Carcieri said he believes children “prosper” best in homes with a mother and a father. “I am a traditionalist,” he said, and this is a “definitional issue” that should be decided by voters, not legislatures or courts, as has happened in other states.
“Put it on the ballot,” the governor said, as Christopher Plante, the state leader of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Organization for Marriage voiced confidence, based on instinct, and not polling data, that the proposal would go down in a referendum.
“If the citizens of our state say that they want to define something differently, so be it. In my job as governor, it is whatever the people say,” Carcieri said.
As a mother and former junior high school teacher of life science and biology, Mrs. Carcieri said she is concerned for children, having taught “all about animal behavior,” and the bodily functions of “nutrition, excretion, growth, reproduction, respiration…But I did point out that human beings are a lot more than that… that our spirits and our souls and our intellect are so important, we can’t just allow us to think we’re only physiological beings, and that’s that.”
“I care about those young people that I taught. I care about my own children and I think it’s important not to experiment … with this kind of thing which we clearly feel has been the nurturing way to bring up children [with] a mother and a father in a society. It isn’t always ideal. I know it’s an ideal. But I think we need to have that as a standard for our society,” she said.
Asked what harm she feared, she echoed the words of the Providence College theology professor who spoke before her in saying: “This does not meet my criteria of natural law.”
Plante said the issue has already had regrettable, real-life impact in Massachusetts where, he said, parents seeking to shield their children from teaching about homosexuality are being told that now that same-sex marriage is legal, it is a “normal” part of the curriculum.
But when spectator - and long-time gay rights activist Ken Fish, 67, of Warwick was later asked if he agreed on the merits of putting the question to a popular vote, he said: “No, absolutely not. How foolish to put a basic right up for a public vote.”
Fish also disputed the notion that same-sex couples cannot properly raise children, he said: “I am more amused by it, than offended by it because there is so much evidence to the contrary. It seems like another argument woven from thin air and ideological belief.”
Rhode Island is now the only New England state that does not recognize gay marriages, civil unions or domestic partnerships. With yesterday’s vote by Vermont lawmakers to override their governor’s veto, same-sex marriage is now legal in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont, while New Hampshire allows civil unions and Maine has had a domestic-partnership law since 2004 that extends certain legal rights, such as inheritance rights, to heterosexual and gay couples who live together under long-term arrangements.
The House Judiciary Committee here had scheduled a hearing for Wednesday night on a bill allowing same-sex couples who married in other states to divorce in Rhode Island, but the hearing was postponed until after the lawmakers’ week-long Easter break because, House spokesman Larry Berman said, the committee had a long agenda and the leadership did not feel it was fair to make people wait hours to testify on an important bill such as that.
The press news conference centered on a new TV ad titled “Gathering Storm.” It features actors - standing against an ominous, gray sky backdrop, saying: “There is a storm gathering and I am afraid ... I am a parent helplessly watching public schools teach my son that gay marriage is okay ... I am a church charity punished because we cannot treat two men just like a husband and wife ... But we have hope a rainbow coalition of peoples of every creed and color are coming together, in love, to protect marriage.” At the bottom of the screen is a disclaimer: “The stories these actors are telling are based on real incidents.”
In response, The Human Rights Campaign, which describes itself as the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization, issued a statement saying: “This ad is full of outrageous falsehoods - and they don’t even come out of the mouths of real people.”
kgregg@projo.com
It's a wonder that he had the time to spare to take a break from his busy schedule of slashing health care benefits to children, disabled people, and the elderly to attend this event.