Ohio Bans HETEROSEXUAL Civil Unions

ABC has just announced that in the grand tradition of Jim Crow laws, the state of Ohio has decided that some of its citizens -- namely gays and lesbians -- don't deserve the same basic civil rights as other people. Lovely. Heck, they even refuse to recognize heterosexual civil unions.

This is the first of what should be a long, painful night of anti-gay measures that will pass in most if not all of 11 states. Take some comfort in this New Yorker article. Margaret Talbot went to an anti-gay rally -- I'm sorry, pro-marriage rally -- where everyone felt obliged to bend over backwards and say they really didn't hate gay people and some of their best friends were gay people and so on. As the article states, they may win the battle, but they're clearly losing the war.

"It was hard to find anyone at the recent anti-gay-marriage rally in Washington, D.C., who had a bad word to say about gays. Chandra Judy, who had come to the “Mayday for Marriage” rally on the Mall with her husband, Manford, and their ten-month-old baby, Eloise, “really wanted to say,” for instance, “that this was not about gay-bashing.” Chandra, who is slender and blond and wore jeans and shiny pale-pink lipstick, said she was a professional dancer in Washington, and knew a lot of gay people. She had no objection to civil unions. What she and her husband were worried about was the institution of marriage. “If the sanctity of one man and one woman is not protected, if we keep expanding the definition, then where’s it going to lead?” Manford wondered. “One man and ten women? A man and a child?” He did not add, as some people attending the rally did, “A man and a dog?” He wore a grave expression and appeared to weigh his words carefully....

"All this careful sympathy for the sinner raised the question of how much appetite Americans—even Americans who oppose same-sex marriage—really have for a long fight against it. According to Michael Cromartie, who directs the Evangelicals in Civic Life project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in Washington, there is “a kind of ambivalence just beneath the surface of opposition to same-sex marriage, even among people of strong religious convictions,” an ambivalence that may mean it will not become the long-lasting social crusade that the anti-abortion issue is....

"Chandra Judy was certainly stressing the positives, as well as she could under the circumstances. “I do believe it’s a choice,” she said, clapping warmly for Dr. Dobson as he strode to the stage. “But if people choose to be homosexual that’s their right, and they should get legal benefits and all those things.”"

Cold comfort tonight, but a warming thought for the future.

UPDATE: Add Georgia and Kentucky and Oklahoma to the list of states attacking the basic civil rights of their gay citizens. Gotta love the red states.