Amazing Race

I’ve been reading about the triumph of Amendment 2 (the Florida Marriage Protection Amendment) and what an amazing victory it really was. It has God’s fingerprints all over it.

John Sternberger who headed the Yes to Marriage efforts in Florida (Yes2Marriage.org) feels it’s the triumph of the Common Man over the Cultural Elites. He summarized the absolutely fierce opposition along the way in his thank you email and it’s too uplifting not to share. Here are some highlights of the hurdles they faced -- and with God’s help overcame...

1. The rules changed after the petition was started, going from requiring 50% approval to pass in the general election to needing 60% approval.

2. A ‘gay’ church in Jacksonville tried to intimidate Florida voters who signed the marriage petition by publishing their names online in a ‘know your neighbor’ campaign. The Yes2Marriage group turned this around and used the website as a tool to help them find friends and family who hadn’t yet signed the petition.

3. The Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections ‘accidentally’ counted 22,000 names twice, thus requiring an emergency effort to get another 22,000 signatures in only 13 days. They ended up collecting over 92,000!

4. Four South Florida newspapers published a month-old news story as if it were breaking news saying that the group had achieved their petition goal even as the emergency collection effort was going on. They refused to admit or report their error.

5. Opponents outspent them 3 to 1.

6. Thousands of yard signs were stolen, vandalized, and destroyed. Billboards were defaced. People who displayed Yes2Marriage bumper stickers had their cars keyed.
7. Every single daily newspaper in Florida (all 27 of them) openly opposed Amendment 2 more than once in their editorial pages.

7. Opponents filed a last minute complaint and a frivolous lawsuit which was denied by the judge on all counts.

8. The day before the election, former president Bill Clinton made a quarter of a million robo calls to scare Floridians into voting no on Amendment 2.

Thanks to the efforts of Yes2Marriage, their allies (including a diverse coalition of churches of various denominations, organizations, and businesses), and many thousands of volunteers, we can relax knowing that words like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ will NOT be removed from textbooks as being bigoted and our school kids will not be bombarded with diversity packs and homosexual lifestyle lectures.

Thank you, God, for keeping marriage sacred in the state of Florida. Let’s now pray that the passage of Propostion 8 will withstand the onslaught of lawsuits in California.