Charles Andersen was my friend
His clothes in our closet
Still smell like him
All these years we kept
Two bedrooms
The one we dusted
And the one we used
Guess we did that, for all of you

-Mark Weigle, All That Matters

Well the outrage among the progressive blogs at the Massachusetts statehouse capitulation to bigotry has just been overwhelming hasn’t it?  Or I suppose it would have been, if they hadn’t all been so busy being outraged about the stuff that really matters.  Good thing I have some links here to a few gay blogs or I might think no one on earth really gives a good goddamn about what happens to gay people in this country…

Kathy over at Pam’s House Blend has a good summary of what happened yesterday …

Despite the high court’s ruling that all citizens, regardless of race, are guaranteed equal protection under the law, the legislature voted today to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would permit white voters to deny certain rights to the black citizens of the state of…

Um, wait.  What I meant to say was, the high court of the state of Massachusetts declared that every citizen, regardless of sexual orientation, has the right to marry.  And now the Massachusetts legislature has taken the first step to place a constitutional amendment banning any new gay marriages on the 2008 ballot.  Because, after all, it’s really important to let the majority rule on the rights of minorities.

If we’d only done that back before the civil rights movement, the citizens of Alabama would certainly have granted Rosa Parks a seat at the front of the bus without all those messy protests.  And "separate but equal" schools?  Why, they would have been voted down by an overwhelming majority in every state.  There was no need for those activists judges to rule in Brown v. Board of Education.

In Massachusetts a minority of homophobic bigots in the statehouse, and the cowards who at the last minute decided to look the other way, will now allow a simple majority of the voters who bother to vote the right to determine what basic human rights minorities in their state can or cannot have.  But never mind.  American progressives clearly have much more important things to worry about.  Hey…how about that Bush op-ed in the Wall Street Journal…