Same-Sex Marriage Ban Trails in California

This is great news.

Opposition to a California ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage is mounting following Attorney General Jerry Brown's move to change the language on the initiative, according to a Field Poll to be released today.

The poll found that just 38 percent of likely voters support the measure, while 55 percent intend to vote no. That compares with 42 percent in support and 51 percent opposed in July.

Brown amended the Proposition 8 summary language after the state Supreme Court's decision on May 15 to overturn California's previous ban on same-sex marriage.

The pollsters found the amended language played a role in that growing opposition, especially among the 30 percent of likely voters interviewed who had never heard of Prop. 8.

Those voters were much more likely to oppose the measure when read Brown's wording (58 percent against it and 30 percent for it) than those in the same category who were read the old version of Prop. 8 (42 percent against and 37 percent for it), according to the Field Poll.

The Brown language reads, in part: "Eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry." The original version read, in part: "Limit on marriage."

Brown's revision makes it clear that voters are taking away someone's rights and that made the difference, said Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo.

The anti-equality folks had originally worded it so that it didn't say explicitly that the amendment would ban same-sex marriage. Now it does. Words have meaning.

What I can't figure out is why the people who are against same-sex marriage don't just come out and say "We think the idea of two men or two women getting married is icky!" That's because if they did, they would expose themselves (pun intended) as the sex-obsessed busybodies that they are. All of their arguments are based on mythology and fear, so they have to hide behind some faux-rationalization such as "Think of the children!" or "It makes a mockery of traditional marriage!" Seeing as how there's no proof that children raised with two men or two women are confronted with any more of the usual problems that all children face growing up -- except for the bigotry of adults -- and since "traditional marriage" is a catch-phrase for a definition of marriage that has been around for about 150 years (and less than fifty if you count the overturning of the miscegenation laws in 1967), and since no one can prove that because two men or two women living together in marriage in one house on the block suddenly destroy every other marriage on the block, the only thing those pathetic homophobes have left is the sex angle. And since they seem far more obsessed with gay sex than just about every gay man or lesbian that I know, it's them that we have to watch out for, not us.

(Cross-posted.)