Dear Governor Schwarzenegger –
Focus on the Family lied, and you swallowed the Kool Aide. Citizenlink.com, the activation network of Focus on the Family, repeatedly refers to Proposition 22 as a “Constitutional Amendment,” such as in this article by their Associate Editor, Jennifer Mesko:
One of the bills, AB 43, is another attempt to force same-sex “marriage” onto the residents of California. In 2000, 62 percent of voters passed a constitutional amendment that states, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
That you signed seven LGBT-positive bills this session has poor Dr. Dobson in a thither, which is nice, but all those calls you got in support of your veto were based on misinformation – that Proposition 22 was a Constitutional Amendment.
What changes this from “shame on him” to “shame on you” is that your office did nothing to correct that misinformation, choosing to use it instead as a smoke-screen for vetoing AB 43 and my relationship.
Not everybody knows the gritty details of how Proposition 22 and AB 43 pass in the dark, but you do. You could have explained that Prop 22 covers 308.5 of the Family Code dealing with foreign marriages while AB 43 restores Sections 300 and 302 to their pre-1977 traditional language, “marriage is between two persons.” But you choose to ride the Focus on the Family Wrongmobile instead.
Depriving me and my family from making the commitment of marriage is wrong, but using convenient misinformation to deny basic freedom is perhaps worse.
Yours truly,