Mid-April Blogging Bits

I've been on the road and busy with end-of-term exams, which is my latest excuse for the light blogging this month. Rather than a comprehensive new post, a few quick observations.

1) After the horrendous setback in California with Prop 8, I'm thrilled to see gay rights on the march in the US. Vermont legislators overturned their governor's short-sighted veto of legislation to permit gay marriage. Washington state has just passed legislation giving gay couples pretty much everything shy of actual marriage. Iowa's Supreme Court has ruled in favour of gay marriage. New York's governor has announced that he will sponsor gay marriage legislation. I guess that feeling of optimism that I tasted in the air when I landed in Newark last week was well-founded! Now if only Obama thought that repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell was as important as striking a task force on pirates...

2) BC is giving electoral reform a second shot. Regardless of what happens with the election, I hope that BC voters - who cast a majority (but just short of the 60% threshold) of their votes in favour of reform last time - will resoundingly endorse Single-Transferable-Vote this time around.

3) Richard Florida, rider of the "Creative Class" hobby horse, is revising his list of best Canadian cities to live in. Details of this list are here if you want to know the top ranked cities in each category, but I'm posting because my new hometown of Guelph is faring quite respectably on the list, placing 6th or 7th for a number of younger and mid-career demographics.

Exams wrap up next week - and regular blogging might resume then. I'm looking for recommendations of new "Canadiana" books to read and review, if anyone has suggestions.

Recommend this Post

US Election - An Imperfect Night

I'm pleased that Barack Obama defeated John McCain and put Sarah Palin safely out of the line of succession. I'm pleased that there is a Democratic Congress and that Joe Lieberman can be shown the door thanks to a healthy margin in the Senate. I think that history was made last night when Americans voted for an African-American man for president. But amidst all this celebration, let's not forget that four states, including two that gave their electoral college votes to Obama, decided to express their viceral prejudice by attacking gay men and lesbians. Last night, Arkansas voters opted to ban gay couples from adopting children. Florida and Arizona voters decided to expressly amend their constitutions to ban gay marriage. But worst of all, Californians voted (by a margin of 52-48) to undo the marriages of thousands of gay and lesbians in the state who had got married in the last several months, after the state supreme court decided that excluding them from the institution of marriage was discrimination, pure and simple. I have friends who yesterday were considered married under California law - their marriage is no longer recognized by the state thanks to Proposition 8.

Civil rights are still an issue in the United States. While last night was a major victory, these results show that it is still considered acceptable by many to write prejudice into the constitution. Can Americans change this? I hope they can.

Recommend this Post

Gay marriage in California

Kudos to the California Supreme Court for overturning the state's ban on same-sex marriage. For some initial reaction and commentary, see Dan Savage's commentary at the Stranger.

The ruling, which will make California the second jurisdiction to permit same-sex marriage (not just civil unions) goes into effect in 30 days, and Governor Schwarzenegger has indicated that he will uphold the ruling, and not support the referendum initiative that is being organized to overturn it (which would be on the November '08 ballot).

This does have the potential to complicate the 2008 presidential election, but as has been pointed out elsewhere, there's always some election or another in the offing. If the Terminator is willing to uphold the ruling, it will make it difficult to present a united Republican front in California at least. Maybe, just maybe, our friends who we visited in San Francisco will be able to get legally married at their wedding ceremony next April!

Recommend this Post