Norm Coleman slapped by veteran; Mike Ciresi clarifies position on gay marriage
City Pages is reporting that while attending Hofstra University, a young Norm Coleman found himself in an argument with Tom Buggeln a Navy veteran who had spent time in Vietnam. At the time, Coleman was a student activist who frequently agitated against the Vietnam War:
[Buggeln] resented what he viewed as the privileged college kids protesting the war and lambasting U.S. policies. Buggeln allied himself with Young Americans for Freedom—a conservative campus group associated with William F. Buckley—and frequently clashed with Coleman. Buggeln remembers one particularly heated confrontation with Coleman after some antiwar students roughed up an ally who was distributing literature on campus. “I went to him and I bitched about it, and we got into it,” recalls Buggeln, now a sheriff’s deputy in Maricopa County, Arizona. The dustup culminated in Buggeln slapping Coleman across the face, giving him a bloody lip. “He ran down the hall screaming, ‘First blood of the revolution!’ or some shit like that.”
I highly suggest reading the entire article. Paul Demko tracks Coleman’s political development from hippie to Republican Senator.
Coincidentally this article comes out on the same day as a similar feature by the New York Times on Hillary Clinton’s political transformation during the same time period from Barry Goldwater supporter to passionate Democrat. Also highly recommended - the highlight for me:
At a panel discussion for a group of Wellesley alumni in mid-April, Mrs. Clinton bemoaned the “large gray mass” of uninvolved students. At another meeting, she argued with an economics professor who suggested that the strike take place on a weekend.
“I’ll give up my date Saturday night, Mr. Goldman, but I don’t think that’s the point,” Ms. Rodham told the professor, Marshall Goldman, according to the April 25, 1968, Wellesley News. “Individual consciences are fine but individual consciences have to be made manifest. Why do these attitudes have to be limited to two days?”
In other MN Senate 2008 news, Eric Black manages to get a clarification from Mike Ciresi on his potential objections to civil unions or same-sex marriages:
Ciresi spokester Leslie Sandberg said Ciresi is fine with “marriage,” if that’s the word a state decides to use. The most important thing to him is that all couples have equal civil rights. He sees it as a civil rights issue and is less interested in the semantics.
(…)
Sandberg said that Ciresi is aware of the push in some conservative circles for an federal constitutional amendment that would prohibit any state from offering marriage or any equivalent of marriage to gay and lesbian couples.
Ciresi opposes that idea and he is concerned that, as a matter of politics, those pushing for such an amendment mighttry to frame it as an issue of religious freedom and raise the spectre of denominations being forced to perform marriages to which they object. So he mentions that he is not in favor of anything that would have such an effect.
Maybe so, but if that is Ciresi’s intent, his chosen answer probably has the opposite effect, by implying that the coercion of religious denomination is an issue that he’s worried about.
I concur with Mr. Black. There’s a simple and elegant argument against those who would easily dispatch that spectre - it’s called the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.