Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has done it again, claiming that gay marriage will financially burden small businesses ["RNC chief: Gay marriage will burden small business," seattletimes.com, Nation & World, May 16].
Steele's comments are particularly absurd coming, as they do, the day after studies published by UCLA's Williams Institute show that, in the five years since it was instituted, marriage equality has been responsible for pumping over $100 million into Massachusetts' economy.
This is due in part to the young and highly educated professionals working in creative fields that are 2.5 times more likely to move to the state than they were before they could marry there, and in part to the money generated by the more than 12,000 same-sex couples that have tied the knot in the Bay State, spending an average of $7,400 per wedding. Obviously, small businesses are benefiting both from the influx of talent and from the revenue related to weddings to the tune of over $20 million a year.
I would love to know how Steele arrives at both his figures and his conclusions. When people ask questions then they see for themselves how absurd the reasons given against equality really are. It's not just ignorance like I naively once thought or at least hoped, it is willful misinformation at it's most basic. Society has caught conservative leadership being intentionally misleading so many times at this point if they told me the Sun was out I'd check for myself.
Republicans, in the absence of your own voices this man speaks for you. Let your silence be construed as approval of Steele's position.
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