Indiana Hate Ammendment fails

This'll learn me to speak before I've studied more background. The state legislation that would've written marriage discrimination into the IN constitution, which I thought must be a sure-fire bet to succeed, didn't even make it out of committee.

Bilerico has more.

The bill's undoing, similar to what we saw with the Arizona ballot initiative last November, was the increasing ambition of the social cons. Emboldened by the ease at which they've been passing these amendments, they've begun to go for more. They would very much like to erase not only any public acknowledgment of same-sex couples, but also any official recognition for people who might be having Teh Sex outside of a legal marriage. This has brought them up against domestic violence activists (because if you're not "married," it's not "domestic.") and another, unlikelier, foe, the business community. Several of the big Indiana-based corporations publicly opposed the bill, fearing it would prohibit them from offering domestic partner benefits and therefore discouraging a significant faction of the populace from doing business for and with them. While it's never reliable to turn to the corporate world for reinforcement of a social good, this is a particularly fortuitous circumstance.

Of course, this may well turn out to be a temporary victory; in a couple of years I expect the social cons to be back with another, more, um, conservative attempt at a Hate Amendment. Indeed, the state's Democratic Party chairman is apparently flopping around already claiming that today's vote "wasn't a vote against traditional marriage" but for "promoting job growth." Hey, maybe we're bleeding jobs because we let the corporations make our legislation! Wait, what was that, again?