What We're Up Against

The Council took a strong position earlier this year opposing the Republican attempt to write bigotry into the Minnesota Constitution through the anti-marriage amendment. Today, the Council had to respond to an open-ended fishing expedition for all communications having anything to do with the effort to defeat that terrible ballot measure, by none other than erstwhile Michele Bachmann staffer Andy Parrish.


Here's just one of the narrowly tailored requests our office spent an hour and a half of taxpayer-funded time responding to:

"Any communication or contact between any combination of the following individuals, their staff, and the identified organizations (including officers and staff) that relates to the proposed constitutional amendment to recognize marriage: Mayor, all current City Council Members, the City Administrator, County Administrator, the City Attorney's Office, and any city established Human Rights Committee or other committees, Project 515, Minnesotans United for All Families, OutFront Minnesota, Freedom to Marry, the Human Rights Campaign, the DFL state party, and state legislators."

Given that Cam is both a member of the Council and a board member of Minnesotans United for All Families, does this include every communication he has with himself on this topic? And how can we share our communications with the Minneapolis City Administrator when there is no such person? (Might they mean the City Coordinator? Who knows!)  And one has to appreciate the artfully euphemistic purpose of the amendment: to "recognize" marriage.  I can recognize marriages just fine without adding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to the fundamental document of our state government, but then again I do wear glasses.

But hey, at least the bigots aren't yet to the point of lighting the City's lawn on fire, as they've done to General Mills.