It is awful. As Jason Lewis was lamenting this evening, in all his years as a conservative pundit, he has never seen liberalism on the march anywhere in America as it is right now in Minnesota. They got handed the keys to the candy store, and rather than eat all the candy, they wanna nuke it just to prove they can.
At first blush, it would seem that 4 republicans, led by my own uber-conservative state house rep David Fitzsimmons, gave bi-partisan cover to this. But upon listening to his reasoning, it's sound. The Leftists only needed 68 votes for this to pass. There are 71 DFL Leftists, and all but two were voting for this - they had 69. It was going to get crammed through as a full-blown homosexer marriage bill without any Republican votes. Fitzsimmons added an amendment that basically changed the bill from homosexer marriage to homosexer civil unions, and further, his amendment supposedly protects religious institutions as well as private entities with religious objections from being subject to any aspect of this outside of legal status. In other words (and according to my understanding) Fitz's amendment means that a church, a religious hospital, or a Chik-fil-A can't be forced to recognize a gay marriage if the objection is on religious ground.
Fitzsimmons is a Paulite libertarian - a streak that runs stronger than ever in my corner of Bachmann's 6th district. It doesn't surprise me that he would be comfortable a) voting for a bill that can be justified as a civil protection for individual rights, and b) voting for a bill that protects religious liberty in the language. It especially doesn't surprise me when I consider that the two options were a homosexer bill that fulfilled the Leftists wet-dream, or a homosexer bill that contained language to protect religious freedom.
My problem now is that the Leftists will work night and day, and the courts will interject, and the provisions that Fitz fought to have added to make this piece of sh*t better will be overturned.
This state is lost.
