Shane Mack - Lie To Me

From the soundtrack for Shelter.

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.