Job 1: Keeping Families Together

by: Dean Barker

Fri Nov 19, 2010 at 21:25:51 PM EST

Happy, healthy families are the vital center of society.

We must do everything we can to protect the families in New Hampshire that are being targeted for dissolution.

Today we learned that majority will be led by a radical.

This is not the time for petty grievances, turf wars, or jockeying for position. Nor for reliving the marriage equality struggle. Someone who played a trivial role in this achievement of this civil right will get a statue in her name someday.  Someone who was critical in the passage of marriage in New Hampshire will be utterly forgotten by the history books. And none of it matters.

What matters is keeping married couples from being harmed.  From families being ripped apart by government intrusion into their private lives.  From the law of the land here in the Granite State being yanked away by out-of-state hate money.

What matters is that we work with a maximum of coordination and discipline.  That we work together, and tirelessly.  That we pursue every avenue, that we communicate with everyone.

We, all of us, have a great burden to share in this struggle.  The votes are stacked against us, and the venom directed at the families we cherish will be toxic and relentless.  Together, we can shoulder this burden, and perhaps even fend off this attack.  But not if we point fingers and retreat into cliques and seek glory individually. Do that, and we lose. Much more importantly, families will lose.

This is an all-hands-on-deck emergency. Every one of you has a skill or set of skills that played a role in your election activism.  Those skills will be needed again to fight for our married friends and relatives.  For our children's rights and happiness.

At this early stage, the primary goal I have set for myself is simple communication.  Do your relatives know that some marriages in this state are in direct peril?  They might not. Do your friends know the rights of some their friends stand to be lost? Is the business community aware of the loss of opportunity that comes with revoking this right? Will they all be ready to shout in Concord's direction with a thunderous voice when the time comes?

For my part, I hope to be able to tell the stories of some those endangered families here in the Granite State. I wanted nothing more after the election than to take a two months' long nap; but there's no time for that anymore.  The time for waking up the good and decent and freedom loving people of New Hampshire to this nanny state threat is now.

I celebrated my 10th wedding anniversary this year.  That I could do so in a place where some of my taxpaying, patriotic friends also could only made my own marriage stronger, my happiness of living in New Hampshire greater.