Belt, suspenders, a rope, a chastity belt, razor wire, attack dogs and firehoses...

None of these measures are enough to protect Floridians from the evils of TEH GAY!!!

Pam's House Blend:: FL - It's Not Called the Hate Amendment for Nothing

For those who don't know, fundamentalist right-wingers in Florida are attempting to pass a constitutional amendment in Florida this year that would ban gay marriage in the Sunshine State. The same gay marriage that is already illegal under four separate parts of state law. And this amendment wouldn't just ban gay marriage, it would also prevent civil unions, cities and corporations from offering benefits to gay couples and anyone from giving benefits to unmarried straight couples. But let's leave aside the practical implications of the proposed gay marriage ban in question, I've talked about that in the past and I'll come back to it over and over again throughout the year, let's look at the hate ingrained in this particular phrase.

This is a tremendous social crisis, greater even than the issue of slavery.

Yea, verily - two members of the same sex committing to each other for life is waaaaaay more insidious than slavery. I mean, as Pam reminds us, slavery's evils were trivial by comparison:

• Slavery caused approximately 30 million people to be ripped out of their homes, families and lives
• Slavery included the horrible conditions of the Middle Passage, where the cramped, diseased and abusive conditions led to the deaths of as many as 15 million people
• Slavery in America was hundreds of years of the near total subjugation of an entire class of people
• Slavery involved the beating, flogging, raping, and murder of millions of people
• Slavery tore apart families, kept people illiterate, and kept most in abject poverty
• Slavery nearly destroyed the United States
• Slavery led to the death of one of America's greatest presidents
• Slavery transformed into sharecropping, tenant farming and the prison-lease system, which combined to keep most African Americans in virtual slavery through the beginning of the twentieth century
• Slavery laid the groundwork for Jim Crow, lynching, a corrupt justice system, assassination and the long-term economic deprivation of African Americans long past the end of slavery

Like, no contest, man!

Some folks gonna be really surprised come Judgment Day.

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