Posted by
Playful Walrus on Thursday, October 02, 2008 7:30:02 PM
Videos made by people outside the official campaigns for and against Proposition 8 are hitting the online video sites, and Los Angeles Times staff writer Jessica Garrison has a piece about this trend, which of course has been going on with Presidential campaigns on a wider scale. I have not seen any of the videos discussed in this piece.
Another homemade commercial features a self-described Jewish Mother, Molly Pier, talking about her late son, a gay doctor whose partner she still considers family. She urges voters to oppose Proposition 8.
You can consider him part of your family if you want. What should that have to do with the rest of us?
The phenomenon poses both positives and negatives for campaigns. The videos may reach voters who aren't seeing traditional commercials, but the campaigns can't control the messages being delivered.
Good points. People should vote for or against something based on its merits, not based on what someone who isn’t even with that campaign likes or doesn’t like about it. In this case, if you think marriage requires a bride and a groom, or if you think that state licensing of marriage should reflect that, or if you simply do not like four of seven judges usurping your authority and countering the public vote, you should vote for Proposition 8 – even if you disagree with why someone else is voting for Prop 8.
Kevin Briancesco, a 26-year-old graduate student in theater arts at Arizona State University, posted a manic anti-Proposition 8 video, "Vote No You Idiot," that included a satirical segue into the "mind of a gay man."
"I have a lot of friends and family that are homosexual," Briancesco said. He said he made three videos -- shot in his bedroom using the camera on his computer -- because he wanted to support gay friends and lobby other friends and family to vote against the measure.
I have friends who have divorced or are leaning towards divorce. Should I support divorce to “support my divorced friends”?
The sarcasm in his video is evident: "I don't know about you," Briancesco says, "but I'm totally OK with having a tiered system of rights for people based on things they can't change about themselves.”
This is a red herring. Granting that people can’t change their sexual attractions, marriage through most of history in most places has not been about sexual attraction. They have been arranged. It has always been about uniting the sexes. Marriage is not mandatory. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to do it. But you do not have the right to force a change on everyone else. There is no right to a state-issued license. That is why we have ID cards for people who don't obtain driver's licenses.
In one ad, made by a comedy group in Boston, a man and a woman face the camera and, stone-faced, declare that they understand why people are upset about gay people getting married.
"It's the sex, isn't it?" the man asks.
The woman agrees, then suggests that the solution might be to let gays marry.
The man looks at the camera: "They'll be lucky if they're having sex once a month."
I’ve written this before, but the Left constantly denigrates marriage, says it ruins sex, says “it is just a piece of paper”, or says it is oppressive. And yet here they are, spending a lot of time, money, and energy to manipulate the courts and influence elections so that they can extend state marriage licensing to same-sex couples. You can’t have it both ways. Does the Left secretly hate homosexual people?