.
Video from Dave Weigel, who describes the “hours-long goat rodeo“:
… It never got violent, but it got heated. At one point, one of the frustrated Latino pastors from New York (churches from that state and New Jersey sent 700 people to the march) broke from the MFM pack and started beseeching the pro-equality protesters for respect. “Free speech!” he said. “Free speech! I have free speech!” I taped him as he bolted to the front of the line, proudly waving his sign and shouting “JESUS!” up until a drag queen who went by Queen Amor invaded his space.
There was a solid hour of this insanity, and a couple hours of lower-grade insanity.
Weigel posted a bunch of great pics later in the afternoon, and finished up with a report from the haters conservative side:
“The dominoes are falling,” said Dr. Bob Borger. “They’re falling faster than I ever thought they could.”
Borger, an Annapolis, Md. pastor, was walking back from the first-ever March for Marriage with two fellow Marylanders. They’d rallied outside the Supreme Court as justices heard arguments for the repeal of California’s Proposition 8. All of the Marylanders had worked on the 2012 campaign to ban gay marriage in their state, too. They were carrying huge signs from that campaign, with the slogan Tell the Governor, Tell the President: Protect Marriage.
But they’d lost. Maryland was one of three states that voted to legalize last year, and that fed into the liberals’ case that gay marriage was mainstream.
“The margin was around 100,000 votes,” said Borger. “It was close, and up until the day of the election I thought we would win.”
Tuesday’s march to the court was put together in six busy weeks by the National Organization for Marriage. More than 5,000 conservatives showed up—better than NOM had expected, not shabby for photos. Less than half of them were white. Spanish-speaking chaplains and families called for every child to have una mama y un papa. Chinese prayer groups gathered in circles to sing English hymns translated into Mandarin. Isolde Cambourne, a French student at D.C.’s Catholic University, waved a Tricolor and spread the news about the mega-rallies for marriage in her country.
And yet the mood varied between nervous, defensive, and panicked. Nobody, not even the red-sash-wearing youngsters of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, would predict an outright court win for their side. They had seen too many dominoes fall…
The arc of the moral universe is long…