If this is the strategy you can kiss any candidate we run in 2016 goodbye.
They think we have short attention spans.
Lowry: Arizona bill the victim of a smear campaign
"The bill was roughly 998 pages shorter than much of legislation that passes in Washington. Clocking in at barely two pages, it was easy to scan for disparaging references to homosexuality, for veiled references to homosexuality, for any references to homosexuality at all."
"They werent there. A headline from The Week declared, "There is nothing Christian about Arizonas anti-gay bill." It would be more accurate to say that there was nothing anti-gay about Arizonas anti-gay bill.
"The legislation consisted of minor clarifications of the states Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which has been on the books for 15 years and is modeled on the federal act that passed with big bipartisan majorities in the 1990s and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton."
If youll excuse a brief break from the hysteria to dwell on the text of the doomed bill, it stipulated that the word "person" in the law applies to businesses and that the protections of the law apply whether or not the government is directly a party to a proceeding (e.g., a lawsuit brought on anti-discrimination grounds).
"Eleven legal experts on religious-freedom statutes who represent a variety of views on gay marriage wrote a letter to Gov. Brewer prior to her veto explaining how, in addition to the federal government, 18 states have such statutes."
"The letter argues that, properly interpreted, the federal law that inspired the Arizona statute covers cases that dont directly involve the government and covers businesses. So Arizonas changes were in keeping with a law once championed by none other than Sen. Ted Kennedy."
"A religious-freedom statute doesnt give anyone carte blanche to do whatever he wants in the name of religion. It simply allows him to make his case in court that a law or a lawsuit substantially burdens his religion and that there is no compelling governmental interest to justify the burden."