Posted on 11/07/2008 11:37:08 PM PST by nickcarraway
At Dodger Stadium, Madonna took time out from her concert to praise the election of Barack Obama and also express her disappointment that Prop. 8, which bans same-sex marriage, was approved by California voter. So says our spy, The Times' Molly Hennessy-Fiske. Listen to Madonna's take here. here. More from Popsquire:
During a celebratory moment for President-elect Barack Obama, M also commented on Calfornia’s Prop 8. She expressed disappointment that “we didn’t win” and offered hope to the audience when she said, “If we can have an African American president, we can have gay marriage!”
Of course, some people were interviewed on TV last night complaining that the big anti-Proposition 8 march in Westwood made them late to see Madonna. The rally generated national press coverage but also clogged traffic for hours. The Times' Jessica Garrison looks at how the No-on-8 forces became obsessed with Mormons:
During the campaign, a website established by Proposition 8 opponents used campaign finance data and other public records to track Mormon political contributions to the Yes-on-8 campaign. Opponents estimated that members of the church had given more than $20 million, but the amount is difficult to confirm since the state does not track the religious affiliation of donors.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimesblogs.latimes.com ...
Who cares?
If Madonna does like the gay marriage ban, then she ought to blame the blacks and latinos for voting for it.
Can't they have the class to retire with their multi-millions, step aside to give another aspiring star a chance, and donate to charity rather than asking us to pay more taxes?
AP Photo/Gary Kazanjian; John Shearer/Getty Images No doubt Madonna has done plenty for gay rights over the years, but where has she been during this year's very heated—and very expensive—fight to try and save gay marriage in California?
Until her concert last night in Los Angeles, the outspoken politically minded Queen of Pop had been uncharacteristically silent about Prop 8, the ballot measure that overturned the legalization of same-sex unions in California.
She didn't even speak a word of it during her concert in San Francisco—San Francisco!—on the Saturday just before Election Day.
And even when she did finally say something, it was brief—very brief.
SNIP
Asked about Madonna's noninvolvement with Prop 8, her rep emailed me, "The one thing I do not have to do is defend Madonna's very very heartfelt and extensive commitment financially, verbally and numerous other ways to gay rights in the course of her career."
Very true, but let's just hope we see more of that decades-long commitment as the battle for gay marriage rages on. This is not the time for silence.
Is she allegedly American again? I thought she was a Brit now, complete with bogus accent.
But maybe I’m getting her confused with Gwyneth Paltrow.
It’s hard keeping track of celebrity idiots.
The logic that launched a thousand cone-bras.
Another reason to be happy I voted for it!
Originally Posted By: KenBreadbox mrstandfast: I'm sorry. I saw a number of pro-Prop 8 commercials essentially characterizing homosexuals as monsters and fools and retaliated in kind. I will try to define my terms and advance the argument as best I can...when I can. Time constraints prohibit the kind of in-depth argument I'd like to mount.
When you say "the case for these rights has not been compelling", right there is one disconnect among many for me. You shouldn't have to make cases for human rights. When you start questioning human rights as they apply to human beings, on some level you're dehumanizing them. Lest we think marriage is not a fundamental human right, let's go to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Article 16. (1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. (3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Now, you will note the first clause does not specify that men must marry women, or that women must marry men. It simply says that men and women of full age have the right to marry. It also implies (in my mind, at least) that marriage in and of itself is sufficient to "found a family". I only note this because so many people seem so determined to deny family status to any couple without children--which includes most (but not all) same-sex couples.
There's my first salvo. Intercept and destroy.
Dan Simmons comments:
This statement shows a profound lack of understanding of culture, government, the United States, of democracy, and of the entire idea of "rights." It's a staggering misperception and the fact that more and more young people tend to think this way -- that whatever they think should be a "basic right" needs to be imposed on entire societies by force -- makes it no less a misunderstanding.
The constitution of the United States created no rights. It tried to define the universal human rights that should be protected through guaranteeing that NO GOVERNMENT SHALL INTERFERE WITH THEM. Thus the right to free assembly, free speech, voting, etc. But the list was very short -- and meant to be. The idea that there is a cosmic, universal, Gaiea-given right for men to marry men (and have sex with them) and women to marry women, (etc.) is absurd.
Marriage is such a basic societal function that every culture in history, while having variations in it, has reserved its own right to legally and socially (and usually religiously) define what marriage is and to whom its status will be granted. These definitions and boundaries to marriage are decided within each culture by human beings based on their basic religious and civil mores and have nothing to do with "basic rights" that have to be imposed by force on citizens and cultures unwilling to recognize them.
Throughout history -- and in some Arab nations today -- it is a man's "right" to marry any number of women he so chooses. The United States does not now and never has recognized that right. Indeed, the U.S. government refused Utah's admission to the Union for decades until the Mormons there legally and officially abandoned polygamy. Thus this "basic right" was denied.
Throughout history -- and in some nations today -- a man's "right" in marriage was to be the de facto owner of the woman he marries. She is legally counted as property and protected in the courts as such. This "basic right" has never been accepted by the people and culture of the United States. It is denied.
Throughout history -- and in many parts of the world today -- it is a basic right of men to marry (and to have sex with) women and girls of any age. A man might marry a girl of six and, if he wishes, force conjugal relations at any time he wishes. The societies supported this (and continue to support it even in some modern industrial nations). The people of the United States -- because of their religious and philosophical background -- have never acknowledged this "right." It is a right denied.
Throughout history and in much of the world today, cultures recognize and legally enforce the "right" of men to divorce their spouses unilaterally and easily -- in some cultures by publicly saying "I divorce you" three times while dropping a stone each time you speak. The United States denies this basic right so commonly associated with marriage.
Until recent years in certain post-industrial (and, whether incidental or not, post-Christian and post-religious) nations, there has been no culture anywhere in the world, no culture in all the annals of history, that granted the term "marriage" with all its accruing legal rights and privileges, to homosexuals wishing to live together. If it is a basic human right, it is one which no one -- not even the homosexuals from ancient Greece (where many city states had elaborate social accommodations for the man-boy relationships, but which held the practice itself to be illegal and immoral) through thousands of years of European pagan and then Christian societies, Asian societies, Islamic societies, African societies, aboriginal societies in Australia, South Pacific tribal societies, Aleut societies in the arctic . . . nowhere in history or the world did men wishing to have sex with men or (much less common) women admitting to wanting to have sex with women -- believe it was any sort of "right" for them to have a public union recognized by the society as marriage.
The United States preserves the democratic mechanism by which to change its official state (but never the many religious) views on what constitutes even so central an institution as marriage -- which has always, in all cultures, at all times, been defined as a recognized union between men and women -- but the idea that this new demand for homosexual marriage is a "right" that trumps all democratic process, and one that must be inflicted on the majority of Americans not wanting it as a feature of their society, and that a small minority of special pleaders should be allowed to enforce such a basic change to society, culture, and laws simply because they shout "basic right!" -- goes beyond being arrogant. It's essentially fascist.
Someone on this forum recently argued -- actually, stated as if it were a truism -- that the best sort of government was a "benevolent despotism." Benevolent by whose definition? Despotisms, by their very nature and definition, are never benevolent because they deny and suppress the most basic right acknowledged and defended across more than two centuries by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States -- the right of a free people to decide their own destiny by free speech, free ballot, and by the will of the people being heard and heeded by their government within the safeguards and protections of the constitution.
These "progressive" judicial fiats that attempt to change the legal and cultural definitions of the single most basic human association and legally protected institution in our or any other culture are not merely wrong-headed, they're dangerous to the very structures of freedom that protect homosexuals and other formerly unpopular groups from real discrimination and harm.
Several years ago, almost two-thirds of Americans were polled as being "very sympathetic" to homosexuals' demand for various "rights." The support of the idea of legally recognized civil unions was -- and remains -- very high.
But gay groups and their supporters overreached by demanding judicial recognition of the basic and profound redefinition of marriage as one of those "rights." Public support went from two-thirds in favor of supporting "gay rights" to almost two-thirds opposed.
It's not Americans' basic tolerance and sense of fairness that changed. It's their recognition that this superior, arrogant, anti-democratic demand that the historical and social definition of marriage itself be changed -- without due democratic process and simply through claims of moral superiority by a minority and their supporters demanding special treatment -- is wrong.
It's not right and it's not their right.--Dan Simmons, dansimmons.com
Anything that pisses that megalomaniacal bitch off has got to be good.
Mad Madge is just roid-raging (and ‘rhoid-raging) because she’ll be banned from marrying a third husband as long as she’s taking those hormones she’s been on...
Thanks.
If they banned plastic surgery, Madonna would legitimately have something to whine about.
And blow her chances for future quickies?
Not bloody likely!
She’s just trying to get even because people are always slamming her.
Why should she care? She lives in Great Britain!
Washed up whore has been. Hardly worth a key stroke.
She also approves of adultery.
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