Sad Days in California

Everything about the arguments about Prop 8 in front of the California Supreme Court is making me grouchy today. Let me enumerate:

1. It's a reminder that 52% of voters decided to take away the right to gay marriage, after 5 months of couples getting married and society not collapsing.
   
2. It seems so freaking obvious that Proposition 8 is a revision to the state constitution, and not an amendment.
   
3. So just maybe this court case should have happened before the damn election, but the No on 8 people were useless, and I don't know where Equality California was before the election.
   
4. Some of the signs carried by the Yes on 8 people are depressing. How cold-hearted do you have to be to draw a red circle and slash through a picture of two people kissing, because both people happen to be men?
   

At this point we just have to wait. At least it looks like the 18,000 marriages from that 5-month window won't be invalidated.

Sometimes, putting family first means putting it off

This article on red state and blue state attitudes towards sex didn't really tell me anything new. But this jumped out at me:

Maybe these choices weren’t originally about values—maybe they were about maximizing education and careers—yet the result is a more stable family system. Not only do couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures, including educational attainment, regardless of their parents’ economic circumstances.

I think the choice to wait to marry and start a family is about values. It's about valuing family so that you wait to marry the right person, not just the one you're with when you're 18. Building a family because you want to, not out of obligation, makes it stronger.

I'm pro-family, which is why I'm voting against Proposition 8. I want everyone to have the chance to put together the family they want.

The Climate of Fake America

Until last December, I had lived my entire life in the Upper Midwest (Michigan and Ohio) and the mid-Atlantic (Pennsylvania). When I was getting ready to move to California, lots of people -- friends, family, and strangers alike -- made all sorts of denigrating comments about California and Californians. I was warned against becoming a crazy driver, becoming a hippie, dying in an earthquake, turning into a self-absorbed asshole in general, you name it.

But once I got here, I saw that Californians couldn't be lovelier. When I say I grew up in a small town in Ohio, they don't say, "Oh god, how did you ever survive?" They say, "Hey, I was in Cleveland recently, and had a good time." When I say that I come from a religious family, and grew up going to church weekly, they don't say, "Ew! How oppressive!"; they talk about their own religious experiences (or lack thereof).

All this "real America" rhetoric from Republicans has rankled me. Growing up, my family was one of the few liberal families in a conservative town, and those "real Americans" would say awful things about us. We ate dinner together every single night, but apparently lacked "family values" because we were Democrats. Now I live in what is unequivocally not real America, and all the fake Americans I know have much more goodwill towards the rest of the country -- not just the parts that look and think like they do.

The culture wars have become one-sided, which bizarrely gives me hope. The McCain campaign has been using them as a last-chance tactic, and it doesn't appear to be working. If Obama wins, they might actually be over.