Clayton Cramer has a (mostly) excellent point:
Governor Schwarzenegger announced that he would veto a same-sex marriage bill passed by the California legislature, and his reason for it was that five years ago, a majority–a rather strong majority at that–of California voters passed an initiative defining marriage as “one man, one woman.” So what was the response of advocates for the bill?
“Clearly he’s pandering to an extreme right wing, which was not how he got elected,” said Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, one of the bill’s sponsors.
Proposition 22, which defined marriage as “one man, one woman” received a Yes vote from 61.4% of the voters at the March 2000 election. So I guess in gayspeak, 61.4% of the population of California–one of the most liberal states in the nation–are “extreme right wing.”
Why he wants to mar this argument with the gratuitous “gayspeak,” I don’t know: Misleading usage by gay activists is no more properly called “gayspeak” than misleading usage by an NAACP leader is properly called “blackspeak” or misleading usage by NOW leaders is called “womanspeak.” But in any event, Cramer’s essential point strikes me as correct and important.
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