California zealot seeks to ban divorce in the state with ballot proposition

It’s so California!

And being ‘so California’ it’s really bad for our mental and physical health, not to mention destroying freedom of choice and the American way of life.

A crazed Bible-thumping, woman-hating, Christian Talibanist has been given the go-ahead by Secretary of State Debra Bowen to gather signatures to place a proposition banning divorce in the state on the 2010 ballot. 

Perhaps Bowen, who authorized the gathering of signatures by John Marcotte of Sacramento, should have attended last weekend’s initial meeting of a 20-member Committee on “Improving State Government” where legislators got stern, tough love lecturing and mandate-like suggestions on how to streamline lawmaking in Sacramento.

The most important headline-making bit of advice came from State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, who, mincing no words, said flat out that our legislators are a bunch of airheads who waste valuable time and money concocting useless, inane and down right stupid laws.

"There's too much junk," Lockyer told the committee members, raising his voice. "I'm sorry, but two-thirds of the bills I see come out of the Assembly, if they never saw the light of day, God bless it. . . . Just stop it! Just stop it! . . . Just say 'No.'" wrote George Skelton in his L.A. Times column on Oct. 26.

A resounding NO! is exactly what Bowen should have told Marcotte.

Marcotte takes offense when writers like Alex Leo, who wrote in the Huffington Post on September 15: “No, John (Marcotte) is not a religious zealot (although he has 12 years of Catholic education), instead he's launched this initiative to mock the proponents of Proposition 8, which added "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California," to the state's constitution. He told CNN this Act is the "logical extension of Proposition 8."

Leo is dead wrong on two levels: Marcotte is a religious zealot of the worst kind and he’s not mocking Prop. 8 or its proponents; he deadly and dastardly serious.

In fact, he’s hoping Prop. 8 supporters will grab hold of his shirttails and latch on the idea of a divorce-free California.

Marcotte said accusing him of kidding is “deeply offensive” and that the divorce ban is a “centrist position with broad, apolitical appeal.”

A centrist position with broad appeal? Only in his imagination!

Logic dictates that if it were a “centrist position,” Californians would not have worked tirelessly to get “no fault” divorce, making the process of dissolving a rotten and possibly abusive marriage more easily and quickly attainable.

Predictably, as all zealots who hate people who disagree with them, Marcotte vilified the media: “ … It just goes to show you how out of touch with mainstream America the liberal media has become,” said Marcotte, a married father of two. “They want to laugh me off as a joke, so that they can dismiss the very real traditional values my movement represents. Secular progressives like Brian Williams, Wolf Blitzer and Mario Lopez would rather concentrate their efforts on advocating for death panels, promoting socialism and discovering who Kim Kardashian is fornicating with this month.”

Proof that he hates women is boldly emblazoned on a t-shirt he designed to sell to his equally nutty supporters of his 2010 California Marriage Protection Act.

The t-shirt depicts a man and woman chained together at the wrists with a heart-shaped lock in the center of the chain.

Unlike the man who is free to do as he wishes, the woman is confined in a triangular-shaped box.

Above the linked couple it says: Until death do us part; below the couple is inscribed: You’re not dead yet.

What he never would consider is a woman or man, who is irrevocably locked in an abusive marriage might ultimately get “dead” at the hands of the other spouse, or at his or her own hands through suicide as the only means of escape. And that person might even make the kids “dead,” too.

Using the canards of “saving the tax payers money” and “freeing up the courts to prosecute wrong-doers,” Marcotte further insults our sensibilities.

Save money? I don’t think so. If he obtains the required number of valid signatures  -- 694,354 --  to get this piece of insanity on the ballot and it passes, it will cost the tax payers dearly tying it up in court for years on end just as is happening with Prop. 8.

The worst of all possibilities is that California’s flock of ill-informed voters, who keep voting for the same corrupt, power hungry, silly law-passing, financially illiterate legislators, will pass this piece of garbage of legislation if it makes it on next year‘s ballot.

Obviously Marcotte is driven by delusional optimism, so if this E-vil proposition passes, what other Bible-dictated tell-us-how-we-should-live ideas does he have on the drawing board? Who or what group is next on his hit list of morally obscene people?

Could it be a ban on pre-marital sex with physical exams required to get a marriage license and if the woman isn’t a virgin she’s stoned in the public square? Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell if a man is a virgin, because if there were and Marcotte could prove he weren’t a virgin, he’d have his penis lopped off.

Any couple caught living together will be burned at the stake?

All children born out-of-wedlock will be branded with a “B” at birth, because everyone knows they are truly bastards?

Baby boys will no longer be circumcised? It’s a Jewish thing, you know and it kills a man’s virility.

Will he propose that women be banned from working and driving, or must be covered from head to toe when in public, or must travel in pairs like nuns or be accompanied by a man carrying a whip?

How about undisolvable arranged marriages for fun and profit and any female who is not promised to a man by the time she’s 17 will be shot as a useless member of society? Any man in the same position will be drafted.

Any married woman who doesn’t produce a child within a year will be put on display for public ridicule.

But, is number one on Marcotte's hit list of how to kill the American way of life as we know it to ban all religions except his own “true” religion fashioned in his own crazed image?