TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Pair Travels Pasco To Keep Marriage Out Of 'The Pit'

ADVERTISEMENT

By TOM JACKSON

Published: October 31, 2008

Land O' Lakes - Brooklyn-born and Brooklyn-reared, Jackie Lewnes was for much of her working — that is, paycheck-earning — life a trainer in self-defense techniques for the New York City police department. But as she crisscrosses Pasco County during the final days of the run-up to Election Day, she wants one thing made perfectly clear, her curriculum vitae notwithstanding.

"Don't make me sound like I'm militant," Lewnes says between delicate sips of hot chocolate. "Because I'm not. But I am passionate."

She is accompanied this day, as she has been most days since last spring, by the equally passionate, if less demonstrative, Jenny Womble, a silver-haired retired elementary school teacher from Missouri, by way of unincorporated New Port Richey, who personifies the Show-Me State's motto.

The pair performs the work of dozens, guiding Lewnes' pewter Chevy Avalanche crew cab pickup down dead-end streets, along northeast rural overlay district back roads, through rough traffic patches at points in between and stopping for nourishment only when it seems Womble will keel over in her shoulder harness, all in an organized defense of traditional domestic unions.

Or, as your ballot likes to call it, the "Florida Marriage Protection Amendment."

The hours, the miles and, yes, even the staggering gas bills are small investments measured against the risk, say these determined females who alloyed a generation ago when both were introduced to the local chapter of Concerned Women for America. Failure means (further) jeopardizing the cornerstone of the national foundation.

Mother and Father Know Best

Studies by responsible academics routinely reaffirm what humans know intrinsically: The best situation for the rearing of children — trademark: "America's future" — involves married, two-parent households where one of the adults is female and the other male.

This Space freely stipulates the existence of exceptions, for better and for worse. However, society's embrace of legal codes that guide construction of bridges, high rises and motor vehicles is instructive. Such regulations add cost and inconvenience, but contribute to the general welfare by promoting safety, soundness and longevity.

Florida's Yes2Marriage campaign suggests society benefits when similar best-practices language regarding families is expressed in its fundamental document. Extremism? Not when defense-of-marriage statutes have been overturned in state supreme courts in Massachusetts, California and Connecticut and are under attack elsewhere.

Thus are Lewnes and Womble supremely motivated. Fretting the proclivities of "activist judges" whose decisions have shut down Catholic Charities adoption work in Massachusetts and produced nightmarish elementary school field trips to lesbian nuptials, the pair forms the energized point of a preemptive spear in Pasco County.

If they and their colleagues in 66 other counties persuade voters to push their initiative over the 60 percent threshold, marriage as the union of one man and one woman will be woven into the Sunshine State's fabric, defusing a similar, and profoundly alarming, eureka episode here.

Hoping Truth Prevails

Polls suggest the amendment enjoys majority, edging toward super-majority, support. Meanwhile, opponents fling arguments ranging from preposterous (domestic partnership statutes would unravel; Florida's Supreme Court already ruled otherwise) to the detestably inaccurate (cohabitating seniors could lose government benefits).

Scandalous, Lewnes says. "Why isn't stealing someone's vote by lying to them against the law?" Because the jails are not large enough? Womble, whose sense of outrage is rather more constrained, waxes biblical: "We're just trying to help prevent Florida from sliding down the slippery slope into the pit."

Come Wednesday, we shall see whether they were prophets, or voices crying in the wilderness.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT