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Visionaires,<br><br>I truly hate to inject the grime of Dale Courtney's Right-Mind blog into a pleasant holiday season, but I would direct you to his most recent entry, in which he, quoting the Idaho Values Alliance spokesperson Bryan Fischer, accuses Nancy Chaney and the Moscow City Council of planning to deliberately violate the laws of the State of Idaho. Word on the Blog has it that Nancy, et al, is planning a full-scale f--- you to the hallowed Constitution of our home state. (She's like that, you know . . .)<br><br>What municipal malfeasance is Dale blathering about? Well, parroting his hero, the Values Alliance director Fischer, Dale says that the City Council's consideration of domestic partner benefits is a direct and orchestrated act of defiance against all that our State holds near and dear. Because Idaho has outlawed same-sex marriage and the "domestic" benefits thereof, the moral guardians of our State have determined that any attempt to extend domestic-partner benefits to City employees is an attack on the moral fibre and legal firmament of the State of Idaho -- nothing less, and certainly nothing as bland as equality of rights under the law.<br><br>Goodness. Why, next thing you know, the legislature might go all apostate and actually decide to extend adequate funding to public schools. It's too damned scary to think about, if, indeed, the legislature thinks about it at all. Courtney's blog counts, of course, on his readers not thinking, and I suppose that with a wink and crossed fingers behind his sweater-vested back, he might hope that the legislature doesn't, either.<br><br>And that, my friends, is the sum of Courtney's moral outrage in the waning days of 2007, a year marked with a bloodthirsty foreign policy, unprecedented disgust on the part of its citizens toward government, jingoistic anti-immigration language and the plummeting moral authority of a nation once regarded as the world's beacon of freedom and morality. I suppose that I wouldn't have thought of my friend Nancy Chaney as the sole vanguard or destroyer of the institution of marriage, but it's been a year of surprises. After all, I never would've thought that any one man's blog could be the source of so much rampant idiocy and bigotry, and yet . . . here we have it.<br><br>Keely<br><br><br><br /><hr />i’m is proud to present Cause Effect, a series about real people making a difference. <a href='http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/MTV/?source=text_Cause_Effect' target='_new'>Learn more</a></body>
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