Reilly caves...

and allows a restrictive anti-gay marriage question onto the 2008 ballot.
He calls this, a due deference to a strict point of law.
Where have I heard that before?
Oh yes, its always a strict point of law when the ruling favors the Praetorians and their agenda.
A strict point of law made George Bush President, and its has been all down hill ever since.
Now, thanks to Reilly's ruling, we can look forward to an invasion of Baptist Shamen, Born Again Witch Doctors, Book-idolators and sundry fanatical jetsam armed with money and intent on changing the Settled Laws of the Commonwealth to suit the back country parsonages of Spartanburg South Carolina.
What is worse, our institution of gay marriage will become a means to fund-raise for the Grover Norquists within and without the GOP.
In his own way, Reilly has surrendered to out of state wowserism as abjectly as the Governor he seeks to unseat.
Gay marriage is, sadly enough, an intensely emotional issue. I do not seek to export it beyond the borders of the Commonwealth into states that are not ready and plainly resistant to this simple and humane point of law.
The Chimes at Midnight cannot change the hard hearts of Waco Texas or Anniston Alabama...onlt time and reasonable discussion can do that.
But we must NOT put a matter of individual civil rights onto the ballot, to place that before a simple majority is to make a potential blood sacrifice of all our rights as citizens.
There is an interesting speech by Abraham Lincoln in Peoria Illinois circa 1854 that ought to be re-read when we discuss gay marriage.
Lincoln makes many arguments based on law and precedent...but his sanest and simplest thesis runs this way: if we assume the negro slave is a man imbued with inalienable rights by a benign creator, then placing those rights before an electorate, is the very negation of both popular sovereignty in general and civil rights in particular.
The negation of civil rights by free and fair election or the repression of said rights by a tyrannical regime amounts to the same thing, inalienable rights duly repressed.
This is Lincoln's precise quote:
The doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and eternally right—but it has no just application, as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such just application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that "all men are created equal;" and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.
The courts have spoken in respect of gay marriage, our courts in Massachusetts hold no brief in Missouri or Nebraska. It is up to a slow enlightening of public opinion to change hearts and minds. Here in the Commonwealth, we must not take back what has been granted, an institution that poses no threat to the law, precedent or the rights and lives of the citizenry.
I think Reilly has made a mistake, a catastrophic mistake that will kick in fully & furiously over time. As far as I'm concerned he is gonna have to start turning water into wine to get my vote in the 2006 primary.