The Anti-SSM Amendment edges closer to the

2008 ballot.
To put this matter to a vote come 2008 would be an unmitigated catastrophe for the Commonwealth. It would be an engraved invitation to every wowser and shaman in the land to invade Massachusetts and attempt a new lasting ideological colonization therein.
Moreover it is simply wrong to put the rights of our fellow citizens up for a vote. What shall be done next? Reinstitute Baptist purdah?
Abraham Lincoln once opined that to put the rights of one's fellow citizens up to a vote on grounds of "popular sovereignty" is the very negation of any concept of sovereignty at all.
The antis keep harping on this spurious notion of "letting the people" vote as a means to obscure the entirely religious basis of their opposition. The constitution is entirely inhospitable to the desire of wowserdom to police the nation's morals...so of course up goes the cry for a "vote". No one voted to grant them their rights, Thomas Jefferson that deist that denier of revealed religion asserted that said rights were inalienable. But somehow now, the inalienable right to marriage have to be first vetted thru a wowser approved ballot initiative.
As far as Humble Elias is concerned, Lincoln made all the pro-gay marriage arguments one needs in his famous "Peoria Speech".
Furthermore, to put this thing on the ballot spells an early finish to any hope that Deval Patrick might truly change the tone of state politics.
I do not believe that the right of gay marriage will make much progress outside Massachusetts for a generation or more. It cannot be exported owing to the electoral power of revealed religion beyond the borders of the Commonwealth.
This I accept, it is a fact.
However, to invite these people in to ideologically colonize the Commonwealth with respect to a matter of settled law is damnable.
And in the final analysis to take away such above noted inalienable rights would damn Massachusetts in time and eternity.
I say to the legislature, vote no, vote to recess, table it, bury do whatever you have to do but keep it off the ballot!