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[Replaced_Texan]

I'm just cutting and pasting her post, cuz I'm lazy and it's easier:

Originally posted by lawgeekgurl

Gee, you mean all those anti-gay measures you passed might have consequences?


I'm shocked, SHOCKED to find out that legislators across our good ole USA may have rushed to push through anti-gay marriage amendments that were poorly written (despite warnings to that effect). Now they reap what they have sown.

Recently, Rufus at Running With Lawyers noted that in Ohio, defense attorneys are arguing that Ohio's gay-marriage ban has the effect of stripping protections against domestic violence among unmarried heterosexual couples. The debate in that post was not so much that the loophole in the law was as wide as a mack truck, and the legislators didn't care in their rush to pass anything anti-gay marriage prior to the presidential election, but that the defense attorneys are taking flak for making that argument on behalf of their clients accused of domestic battery. I say a defense attorney is obligated to use any and all legal arguments he or she can to protect the rights of their client, and if the law is flawed, and an argument can be made, you are obligated to make it. Ironically, the public defender's aide who came up with this argument was against the gay marriage amendment in the first place, and admits that he came up with this idea while brainstorming about how to make the amendment look bad. Guess what? It worked.

Now, in Utah, they are having similar problems with their hastily drafted anti-gay marriage bill

"Taken literally, the gay marriage ban could deny hospital visitation or survivor's property rights to children being brought up by grandparents, or to senior citizens who live together but do not marry for financial reasons. Siblings living in the same household also could find themselves without customary rights.

Utah's Legislature — overwhelmingly Republican and Mormon, and one of the most conservative bodies in the nation — ignored warnings from the state's Republican attorney general that the amendment went too far. Utah voters ratified it with 66 percent approval in November."

In Indiana, where the gay marriage amendment* was the "most important issue facing Hoosiers today" before the election according to Brian "Grandstanding is my middle name" Bosma, then head of the Republican minority in the House - so much so that the Republicans staged a much-publicized walkout during the session when lawmakers were urgently trying to pass property tax reform (arguably a much more pressing issue, given that the state was and is far below expected tax revenues, and a constitutionally mandated property tax fix ended up raising some urban homeowners' bi-annual tax bills as much as 300%). The Republicans succesfully captured the majority in the House in the following election, largely because they campaigned on the gay marriage amendment issue in the conservatively Catholic districts in southern Indiana. Dems who had opposed spending time debating the gay marriage amendment in favor of tax relief and other bills during the session were soundly defeated, as they were perceived as "pro-gay." Now that Bosma's the speaker? Oh yeah, gay marriage amendment? Not such an urgent problem anymore. And might I say: bastards.

*Indiana, like the majority of states, had already passed a law which made gay marriage illegal. The Republicans wanted an amendment to the state constitution duplicating the law. Recently, Indiana's Court of Appeals upheld the gay marriage law already on the books, but not before Bosma and the Repubs in the legislature declared it was not so urgent to pass an amendment after all.