Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Comity Comedy Run Ending

Well, it only took 94 years, but the Boston Globe finally got it right on kissing bigots' butts with our marriage laws. Who says people can't change?

At this blog, search for comity or 1913 and you'll find a swarm of posts decrying the irrationality, futility and spite inherent in Chapter 207, Sections 11, 12, 13 and 50 of our General Laws. Those are the totally one-sided genuflections to other states' laws that limit marriages for one type of discrimination or another.

Not only do they not do the same for us, they do not obey the basic principle of comity. They do not recognize our legal marriages.

Curl up and die, Virginia and you other villains!

The concept behind our lickspittle laws before WWI was that we allowed interracial marriages and many states did not. In some sort of anti-migration fantasy, we would forbid couple coming here to marry and then returning to their home states to sue for recognition of their new status.

Absent a totalitarian state, we cannot and would not as a nation try to stop migration of our citizens. Nor would we prevent them from seeking redress in courts or legislative bodies. That would be, how would you Americans call it, unAmerican.

So those laws were never invoked or enforced until the incredible tag team of then Gov. Willard Mitt Romney, then AG Tom Reilly, and risibly passive judges of the Supreme Judicial Court agreed that it was okay. Sure, keep those homosexuals from marrying here and going to other states to ask for equal rights in court.

The facts are that these laws are not only odious and unAmerican on their face, they make us suckers. We bend to the bigots out of state and they do nothing to accommodate us. They spit and stomp on our marriages and accept that as their due.

Well, Sen. Jarrett Barrios has put this simple call to repeal these laws before his chamber repeatedly. It's Senate Bill No. 800 this year. Let's get real. Let's get honorable. Do this quickly.

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