Maine, The Matthew Shepard Bill, And Slipping One Through The Cracks

Yesterday, the voters of Maine decided to take away marriage right of its LGBT citizens.

I haven’t done the fact checking (because I’m at work) so at best, I’m just spreading a rumor, but I received a text message this morning from a friend who stated that NPR was reporting that Maine had a job stimulus bill attached to the Yes side of the vote. It seems to me the measure was destined to fail to begin with.

Recently, a federal hate crime bill was signed into law by President Obama. I was proud that something like that was pushed through all of the branches of the government and signed into law until I was told that it was a rider to the Department of Defense’s budget. Then I didn’t feel that the bill had as much of an impact.

I don’t want my protections, my rights, or my freedoms as a gay man to be signed into law because it rode in on the shirt tails of some other bill. I want those protections, rights, and freedoms to be granted to me because they have already been bestowed upon me in the Constitution.

I realize that this has been a practice in Congress and state legislature for a long time. It just seems wrong to me to allow a separate and probably unrelated bill to be signed into law as almost an afterthought to original bill.

I also realize that through out any session on Congress or state legislature meetings that there is a full docket and it can be very hard, if not impossible to get through. Lumping a few bills together, I assume, can expedite the process of having a bill signed into law.

While I want the protections, rights, and freedoms that I deserve as a citizen of the United States, I don’t want them to be an afterthought because they were a rider to another bill.