VoteOnMarriage had better listen up. A recent opinion piece in the radical homosexual newspaper, Bay Windows -- by the simpering house-"husband" ("married" to a man) who writes Boston Globe magazine articles about buying pink dresses for "their" baby daughter -- floats the latest idea on how to block the marriage amendment.
As VoteOnMarriage prepares for the next Constitutional Convention (which could come as early as May 9), where their amendment needs to be approved for a second time by at least 50 legislators before moving on to the voters, they should ready their arguments against the Bay Windows crowd, who say:
The following section (4) of the article [Article 48, outlining the procedure for citizen-initiated amendemt proposals] notes that upon receiving affirmative votes from one-fourth of the representatives [which happened on Jan. 2, 2007], the initiative “shall be referred to the next general court,” as it has been.
But this is the catch: in section 5, the final step of the process, there is no similar stated requirement for a second vote. Instead, there is only the conditionally-worded provision, that the initiative shall go before voters “if [it] shall again receive the affirmative votes…” The lack of a call for a second vote is not a mere technicality; or, I should say, in the law, there are no “mere” technicalities. Judges and legislators alike continually turn their eyes to the letter of the law, not the romantic or impassioned interpretations thereof, to settle questions of legal merit.
One might argue that the second vote is implicit, and that its omission from the text is a word-saving device by the amendment’s authors. But this seems unlikely when one reads the entire text; the article goes to great and somewhat linguistically unwieldy lengths to include all necessary factors, like the allowance for a submission of an amended version of the initiative’s wording. In terms of this debate, then, Article 48 is quite explicit about what is required: one vote on the initiative. For legislators who wish to be seen as towing the line, forcing upon the text an imagined requirement for a second vote is to then trump the actual law in favor of appearing to obey it. And to what end? Our legislators have already fulfilled their duties. They can now stand proud before the citizenry, able to state without hesitation that they took the job seriously and got it done.
Bay Windows also kindly provides the text of Article 48 at the end of this opinion piece. Of course, liberals only refer to original documents if they see an opening to manipulate some unintended loophole.
