Reply #27: Let's run some numbers here [View All]

50states.com says Alabama contains 4.5 million people and 25 percent of them are under the age of 18--hence, about 3.375 million people can vote.

Of these 3.375 million people, about 650,000 of them (nineteen percent) voted to weld hate into the Alabama constitution. It is very possible that every person whose marriage will be destroyed if gay people can get married too went to the polls. I figure the 146,553 who voted no were mostly gay, and I'm not being derogatory here. For what is essentially a single-issue election, only the people who have a personal stake in the outcome tend to go to the polls--which is why the turnout at primary time routinely sucks. If there are 140,000 gays in Alabama, all of them would have turned out to vote no. Some hetero liberals came out too...but for most people, this election wasn't a huge deal. Gay marriage is already illegal in Alabama and would have remained so even if this referendum would have failed. So fuck it, man, why bother, it's not like anything's gonna change.

The real shocker is that they put this on the ballot in the spring. If I was a Repuke, I'd have wanted it on the November ballot, to motivate the right wing to come to the polls...oh, and while you're here putting the gay marriage ban into the constitution could you do us a favor and vote a straight Republican ticket too? The fuckers threw away their best wedge. This may be the worst campaign strategy since Bob Shrum decided to let John Kerry be photographed in a cleanroom suit.