Have Children Or Else

The state of Washington is a magnet for the eye of Sauron/righwing punditocracy right now. First it was the offensive launched in the War on Christmas by the Port when they defiled Christ by removing the Holiday trees from Sea-Tac. Then An Inconvenient Truth was banned and unbanned from educational venues in Federal Way, but today it's our same-sex marriage proponents down in Oly that are ruffling feathers - They've proposed a ballot measure that would require heterosexual couples to prove their marriages by producing an offspring within three years. Or face annulment.

The Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance is behind the legally mandated breeding effort, and, of course, it's a joke. Well, not so much of a joke as completely absurd.

From their website:

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 unconstitional 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.

Right wingers, although they may be strangers to jokes, are very well-versed in the absurd. While we can see the rationality behind this proposal it is, of course, very much absurd and seems like conservative baiting at its finest. It's not for no reason that the state of Washington has drawn so much conservative attention lately - we're bringing it on ourselves. We're gunning for the title of most-hated liberal outpost, but we still have a lot of work to do before we can wrest that crown away from San Fransisco. The day the world needs to be protected by a wall of ten-gallon hats drawing beads on "Seattle Liberals" hasn't yet arrived, but it's on the way if we can turn some of this fancy talk into actual law. And we say, fine. It'd be nice to live in a city that is relevant nationally in both the cultural and political worlds. If we're to be the liberal equivalent of bumfuck Kansas or something so be it. Someone's got to do it. In the meantime we'll get to work on that kid.