Does Palin support the FMA?

I have to admit that I have never been too concerned about FMA since I see no time in the near future that there is a chance of it happening. I actually put it in the same area as a flag burning amendment. All soapbox and no substance. Same thing goes with a balanced budget amendment.

One of the beauties of the US Constitution is that it is very difficult for anything to get into it without a wide range of support. (Prohibition may be the exception to the rule; but we see how that went) I think the only thing that would ever scare me is a Constitutional Convention. That would send me packing for New Zealand!

The only thing that should be in the Constitution are items that expand rights or make necessary changes to government that can only be done at that level. Otherwise you end up with messes like the Florida Constitution that has stuff about pregnant pigs and high speed rail.

As far as the court, I suspect the current balance will remain through any Obama presidency. Only the left leaning judges will retire during Obama's term. So, I don't expect any major shift unless there is an unexpected death. Give it another ten years and gay marriage will have played itself out in the states anyways. Personally, I am in the get rid of marriage as a function of the state and leave it to religion. Let the state regulate legal unions.

I can see numerous issues being resolved by State Rights and marriage is one of them.

Tainted toys, failing banks, natural disasters all tilt the public?s mind towards Federal salvation. After eight years of Bush, I am not sure why the present court is so inclined to create new Constitutional Rights. You guys got two judges.

Rulings on Gitmo, Torture, FISA, privacy give ample opportunity for the courts to define new rights or deny them. I wonder why such educated Justices would ignore the perils of Constitutional tinkering in any attempt to engineer "national consensus".

Civil Rights could easily merge with new civil causes. At what point does the mandate mantra drown out Liberty? When America is as it should be?

I was pretty much with you until you said

while proponents self-aggrandize themselves into a new civil rights movement

It's pretty clear to me that most Americans enjoy the luxury of feeling that they don't want to be bothered or distracted by the issue of gay union rights. Yet I simply can't conceive of how one can deny that its a civil rights issue. I have heard more than one person express the notion that he or she feels that it's not really a civil rights issue because it doesn't feel like it's that big of a deal, that's it's on the way to a reasonable outcome, and so on. This strikes me as extraordinarily sloppy reasoning.

That Palin supports the FMA is not a big deal for me because I've now judged her to be both a relative lightweight and a transparent panderer of red meat cant to the base. The cant would not bother me so much if she had shown me that there was more to her than that, but I'm still waiting to see some sign of something that passes for deep original thought.

Her support of the FMA is a good example of this lack, IMO.

_________
I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel. -Horace Walpole

the issue won't go away for years, despite the demographic changes that will result in making gay marriage very acceptable to most people as older people die off.
Here in CA we got prop 8. It's a tight race. Guaranteed it will be fought again in 2 years, no matter who wins. Although inevitably the anti-gay marriage forces will lose enough at some point down the line to stop them from trying again.

This year there's a lot of outside money from church groups including a lot of east coasters and mo's as well as various civil rights organizations. Estimates range up to 50 million spent on this campaign.

My take. What a effin waste. It costs St. Anthony's dining room 1 dollar to provide three balanced, healthy meals. 1 dollar, 1 day, 1 person.
50 million dollars feeds 50 thousand poor people daily for about 3 years.

So much for feed the hungry, clothe the poor, etc....