Today's Breaking News Alerts

[mabfan]

California: 5.4 Earthquake Rattles Los Angeles Area

Alaska: Senator Ted Stevens Is Indicted

Massachusetts: House Votes to Repeal 1913 Marriage Law

Discuss.

Comments

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I read about the Stevens thing on the intertubes.

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

Oh no!

Oh, dear.

Yay!

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

So... the earthquake is Senator Stevens' fault, and as a result MA repeals the 1913 law.

Works for me!

[arib.livejournal.com]

The earthquake is California rumbling with indignation as we steal their wedding-tourist dollars.

[bluepapercup]

WE ARE ANNOYED

[arib.livejournal.com]

We did it first! :-)

[bluepapercup]

Yeah, well, we're gayer than you are, nyah nyah.

[arib.livejournal.com]

Probably, yeah. :-)

[bluepapercup]

Aww, don't worry, we'll send you a big care package of rainbow flags and SF sourdough bread to celebrate the 1913 repeal. :)

I only wish I could be there for it! It was so exciting to live in MA the first time around!

[lensman.livejournal.com]

The earth has found hope and begins to shake with joy...
Ted Stevens: So dirty even the Bush Administration had to indict him...
One more small step, many more to go...

and for added fun:

Another McCain Involved In Bank Collapse?

[sdelmonte]

The quake is kinda minor, by LA standards and by recent disaster standards.

So is Stevens, but we can hope that he will lose in the fall and a seemingly safe GOP seat is lost. (More likely, if the scandal is bad enough, the GOP will do what the Dems did with Torrecelli and replace him late in the game.)

Fill me in on the 1913 law.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

The 1913 law banned nonresidents from getting married in Massachusetts should their home state have laws against their marriage. It was primarily used to ban marriages between a white partner and a black partner from states where those marriages were prohibited.

When same-sex marriage began in Massachusetts, Governor Romney invoked the law to state that only state residents of the same sex could get married here. Out of state couples were told that they could not do so, unless they were establishing residency.

[carolf.livejournal.com]

On this whole front, I saw a commercial yesterday that made me stand up and hug the TV.

I had been enjoying the Chemistry.com commercial where a couple (30ish to 40ish white heterosexual) is sitting on the edge of a public fountain, and she tells him she vows never to wear a flannel nightgown. Pause. Deep, loving look from him to her. He answers "can you make that you vow to never wear a nightgown?" They laugh and cuddle, while a voice-over talks about how nice it is when you meet your true match, and how Chemistry.com makes it happen. What can I say. I still watch Hallmark commercials, too.

So, now they have a new one. A couple (20ish to 30ish, white homosexual) in the grocery store, holding hands in front of a display. Dialogue:

He1: I vow never to play the role of the martyr.
He2: That's your mother's job.
[laughter]
He2: I vow never to tel our friends that you sometimes use a bronzer.
[holding hands, looking meaningfully at one another.]
[commercial voice-over]

If gay coupling is being portrayed exactly as heterosexual coupling in a commercial, can common sense be far behind? It won't be common sense, of course, it'll be commercial sense. But in this case, I'll take it!

[carolf.livejournal.com]

Drat. I even looked up "miscegenation."

Honest. I did. And it was spelled exactly as I spelled it.

On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.

[nojojojo.livejournal.com]

I'm curious -- if this law is repealed, would that retroactively annul any nonresident gay marriages that took place? For that matter, would it annul any interracial marriages that took place waybackwhen, prior to the law?

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure I understand the question. Technically, under the law, no same-sex nonresidents were allowed to get married in Massachusetts. But if they already did so, in violation of the law, and now the law is repealed, why would their marriage have to be annulled? If anything, they could now come forward and say that their marriage is now completely legal.

Or are you saying that they'd have to go through the marriage again? I don't understand.

[ckd]

And yet he never had opposite-sex couples from out of state grilled to see if they might be within a level of consanguinity that's legal in MA but not in their home state. F'ing Romney.

[elul-3.livejournal.com]

This has bugged me to no end for the past four years...

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not like he was actually going to be consistent about the whole thing...

[michelel72.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thanks for the mention of the earthquake. I hadn't heard; now I've done my duty by spreading word so that family members in that area will be checked on.

As for the other two, schadenfreude-yay and yay-yay.

[fibro-witch.livejournal.com]

Once again Massachusetts leads the way. We invented the concept of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and we mean it.

[sarsmicama.livejournal.com]

a 5.4 quake is nothing in CA. Not sure why it even merited the news on anything but a really slow news day.

[sarsmicama.livejournal.com]

I also read an interesting analysis on why MA repealed the law. They were saying that since CA will marry couples regardless of their home state's acceptance of said marriages, MA wanted to get some of the additional income that the marriage industry brings instead of all the marriages coming to CA.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of us would agree that there is an economic reason why the state legislature chose to act now.

[carolf.livejournal.com]

But, of course!

Isn't that exactly how Capitalism (note the cap) is supposed to be?

How ... American!

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

Are we supposed to guess the order of causality? :)