The Exaggerator

First of all, a big ol’ yay for San Francisco. (Yes, I’m a bit late.) The day city officials began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, I talked with my mom on the phone. (My parents live in the Bay Area.) She told me that when she saw the news reports on TV, with all the couples at City Hall, especially the lesbian couple who had been together for more than fifty years, she thought, “Yeah, they should get married.” And the word she used to describe Mayor Gavin Newsom: “brave.” How encouraging. Go, mom.

[A few weeks ago, following the most recent court ruling in Massachusetts, she half-jokingly asked me if Thom and I were going to go up there and get married. Me: nervous laugh. Heh.]

On to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’m going over the transcript from Sunday’s Meet the Press. Not a fun read, but if you’re looking for senseless hyperbole, boy, does he serve it up:

So we cannot have, all of a sudden now, mayors go and hand out licenses for various different things. If it is—you know, in San Francisco, it’s the license for marriage of same sex. Maybe the next thing is another city that hands out licenses for assault weapons. And someone else hands out licenses for selling drugs. I mean, we can’t do that.

Good lord. The slippery slope from equal rights to assault weapons and drugs?

Then it got to be a bigger issue and a bigger issue, and then yesterday, when I was in San Francisco for the Republican convention, all of a sudden we see riots and we see protests and we see people clashing. The next thing we know is there are injured or there are dead people, and we don’t want to have that.

And then later, in response to what he would do if the state legislature were to legalize gay marriage:

You know something? I don’t deal with hypotheticals. There’s so many problems that we have in our state of California now, financial problems, economic problems, and all this, I’m dealing much more with reality, not with hypotheticals.

Oh, I see. He can conjure up hypothetical drug and assault weapon licenses and hypothetical riot deaths if it means cracking down on gay marriage, but hypothetical legislation is not worth thinking about. One more thing:

I think this is all a legal matter now, and I directed Attorney General Bill Lockyer and said, you know, that he should now take care of this problem.

What does Lockyer, who himself believes same-sex marriage to be illegal under California law, have to say about being told what to do?

“The governor can direct the Highway Patrol. He can direct the next Terminator 4 movie if he chooses. But he can’t direct the attorney general in the way he’s attempted to do,” Lockyer said, adding that Schwarzenegger’s written directive “was a statement designed for consumption at the Republican convention.”

In a fax Friday night to the home of a Lockyer aide, the governor wrote: “I hereby direct you to take immediate steps to obtain a definitive judicial resolution of this controversy.” The message also said that San Francisco’s actions to wed gay couples “present an imminent risk to civil order.”

Lockyer called that statement “preposterous” and said it is the kind of “exaggerated, hot rhetoric” that risks stirring people up to commit hate crimes.

Exactly.