How To Get Clean

First, from Alinsky's Rules For Radicals - maybe the closest thing in my life to a bible - :

RULE 4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity's very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)

Now, here's some folks in Washington State who 'get it':

The Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance seeks to defend equal marriage in this state by challenging the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling on Andersen v. King County. This decision, given in July 2006, declared that a “legitimate state interest” allows the Legislature to limit marriage to those couples able to have and raise children together. Because of this “legitimate state interest,” it is permissible to bar same-sex couples from legal marriage.

The way we are challenging Andersen is unusual: using the initiative, we are working to put the Court’s ruling into law. We will do this through three initiatives.

The first would make procreation a requirement for legal marriage.

The second would prohibit divorce or legal separation when there are children.

The third would make the act of having a child together the legal equivalent of a marriage ceremony.

Absurd? Very. But there is a rational basis for this absurdity. By floating the initiatives, we hope to prompt discussion about the many misguided assumptions which make up the Andersen ruling. By getting the initiatives passed, we hope the Supreme Court will strike them down as unconstitutional and thus weaken Andersen itself. And at the very least, it should be good fun to see the social conservatives who have long screamed that marriage exists for the sole purpose of procreation be forced to choke on their own rhetoric.

Initiative 957

If passed by Washington voters, the Defense of Marriage Initiative would:

- add the phrase, “who are capable of having children with one another” to the legal definition of marriage;

- require that couples married in Washington file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage automatically annulled;

- require that couples married out of state file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage classed as “unrecognized;”

- establish a process for filing proof of procreation;

- make it a criminal act for people in an unrecognized marriage to receive marriage benefits.