Supporters Speak

Jeff Jones, Lexington

Last week Congress pushed the button to nuke my family. There wasn't any plutonium involved, just ugly partisan politics. 

Unfortunately for Kentucky families, even the Commonwealth's lone Democratic representative, Rep. Ben Chandler, broke ranks with the majority of Democrats to join with US House Republicans in voting for a constitutional amendment to keep marriage as a special right for heterosexuals. Worse yet, the wording of the amendment might well have banned civil unions.

Ultimately the amendment didn't get the supermajority votes it needed to pass, but it was another ugly abuse of GLBT families to muster up conservative voters for the Nov. elections.

When nations fight, there is a clear distinction between regular warfare and nuclear war. The same can be said of politics.

In the political arena, the analogy to nuclear war is enshrining an exclusionary law into a state or national constitution via a constitutional amendment. It is one thing to pass a law that can easily be undone. It is an altogether more serious thing to rewrite the Constitution, the very core legal document of our society.

Ben Chandler has been clear that he believes marriage should be a special right for heterosexuals. I disagree, but perhaps could understand if he voted for a bill to further entrench these special rights. Chandler represents after all a state that overwhelmingly voted to ban same-sex marriage and civil unions.  

This July anti-marriage amendment, however, goes nuclear. It shuts down the entire democratic process of discussion and social change. It is slamming the door on equal marriage rights for this and future generations. With this vote, Ben Chandler spits on our families.

The very next day Chandler again voted with Republicans for an amendment to take away the right of courts to hear cases involving the "Under God" phrase inserted in 1954 into the Pledge of Allegiance. However you feel on the Pledge issue, is it really necessary to create an exception to our Founders' system of checks and balances?

Chandler clearly could have said he opposes gay marriage but that he doesn't feel a Constitutional amendment is appropriate...or that he wasn't falling for election year Republican gay-baiting...or that marriage laws should be left to individual states as they are now and that the federal government shouldn't be getting into the states' marriage turf.  Instead, he voted to nuke our largely Democrat-voting families. 

Such radically over-the-top politics goes too far. Some political actions and votes are so extreme that they make it impossible to support a candidate. I can no longer support Ben Chandler or any of the Kentucky representatives who voted for these amendments.